ABSTRACT
When people talk about accessing information on the World Wide Web, they use expressions or words that refer to traveling through space. Even though the agent is not actually in motion, the linguistic forms chosen suggest that the agent is moving along a trajectory towards a destination. For instance, people talk about "travelling on the information superhighway", "surfing the net", "going to a web site", and "crashing into a deadend". Such phrases are metaphorical in that they involve a mapping of image-schemata (Lakoff, 1987; Johnson, 1987; Turner, 1987), such as SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, from the source domain of physical travel onto the target domain of information access. This kind of language use is not arbitrary but results from a coherent system of metaphorical thought in which the abstract is expressed in concrete terms.
