La metáfora en la formación del vocabulario del ciclismo en francés

Abstract

Metaphor is one of the most frequently used resources in the language of cycle racing in order to create its vocabulary. The present paper analyses, on the one hand, metaphors used to name the different parts of the bicycle and, on the other, metaphors referred to the agent (the cyclist). The analysis of these metaphors shows that they are related to two different types of needs: naming needs in the first case (to give a name to something that does not have one) and expressive needs (to use a name expressing the notion in a more expressive way than the technical name) in the second. In the technical field, the metaphor is based on formal or functional analogies, whereas metaphors referred to the agent are related basically to two source domains: the railway and, above all, the epic-military language