Metaphorical ICMs In Cybergenre Representation
Metaphorical ICMs In Cybergenre Representation

Summary/Abstract: In internet sites we often find expressions like "home", "visit", "down-load", "link", and many other which are used in new senses that did not exist before the internet era. Such expressions constitute the manifestation of mental models that are transferred from traditional conceptual domains onto the new domain of the Internet. In addition, new genres have appeared recently in cyberspace, and conceptual metaphors are some of the cognitive models that help in their conceptualisation. This paper aims at describing the metaphorical Idealised Cognitive Models (henceforth ICMs) that build our idea of a particular cybergenre in English – the feature website – and of the way it is configured according to such models. The task here consists in detecting these metaphors as well as describing and classifying their conceptual mappings between domains. With that purpose, a collection of feature websites is analysed to test the hypothesis that such mappings and ICMs guide the user's representation of the genre, as a coherent structure. The results may show different cognitive models for conceptualising the coherence of a web genre.

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