Meteorological Metaphors in Description of Pathological States: Conceptual Models in English and Russian Medical Discourse

This article examines metaphors incorporating nominations of natural phenomena used for the conceptualization of physiological, sensory, and cognitive impairments within English and Russian medical discourse. The primary objective is to identify and juxtapose conceptual models featuring core meteorological components — fog , storm , wind , and snow — alongside peripheral elements such as thunder , lightning , rainbow , and dew in the description of physiological, sensory, and cognitive dysfunctions. The methodological framework is grounded in a cognitive-semantic approach; the study proceeds in three stages: lexicographic extraction of domain features for “natural phenomena,” the construction of “nature / bodily state” transfer schemas, and the contextual verification of corpus examples. The analysis demonstrates that in English-language medical discourse, metaphors with meteorological components are more frequently lexicalized as established terminology (e.g., cytokine storm , brain fog , visual snow ), whereas in Russian discourse they predominantly function as calques and explanatory nominations, primarily in physician-patient communication; nevertheless, a trend toward the convergence of these strategies is observed. The study reveals cross-linguistic divergences in imagery within scientific prose and in the degree of expressivity of metaphors in popular-medical genres.