Explication of Zoomorphic Metaphorical Nomination in Clinical Terminology (on the material of the Russian, English, German and French languages)

Being an integral part of any language, culture and thinking, metaphorization is deeply enrooted in medical terminology and is an amazing linguistic phenomenon. Metaphorical transfer of the characteristics of commonly used objects and typical phenomena into the field of medicine facilitates making sense of sophisticated professional terms, and develops human cognitive activity. The article studies the ways of explication of zoomorphic metaphorical nomination in clinical terminology in the Russian, English, German, and French languages. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is for the first time that the means of zoomorphic metaphor explication are compared and contrasted in closely related and unrelated languages, special emphasis being made on the language parallels. The aim of the paper is to identify the similarities and differences in zoomorphic metaphors based on the names of some anatomical structures, signs/characteristics/phenomena, symptoms/syndromes/ reactions/ manifestations /deformities, pathological conditions / pathologies / defects in the above mentioned languages, taking into account the available language means and calculating the nominative density. The study is also essential with regard to clarification of the mechanisms of sense production, expressing and explicating themselves differently in specific terminological systems. The research methods are: comparative and contrastive method, descriptive method of systemic language analysis, and the componential analysis of the lexical meaning. The material for the analysis was selected page-by-page, primarily focusing on the terminological collocations in Ancient Greek/Latin where the first or the second component is derived from the name of an animal, a bird or an insect as well as on one-word terms in Ancient Greek/Latin with or without mentioning the name of an animal, a bird or an insect. As a result, some groups of zoomorphic metaphors have been identified, namely, the instances of complete similarity based on the external feature with fixation of the name of an animal, a bird or an insect in the Greek-Latin component and in the dictionary definition, the instances of external similarity without fixation in the dictionary definition, and the instances with the absence of the respective names in the Ancient Greek/Latin terms. Despite the common features of Greco-Latin nomination underlying zoomorphic metaphor, a number of inter- and intra-language variants of zoomorphic metaphor as well as different normative density have been determined.