Marion Eva Ernst

• No other means of communication determines through its seemingly unrestricted possibilities our everyday life more than the internet. From the mid-90s onwards, more and more technical advancements in the field of communication appear on the market, which in turn call for new terminology. In the first place, it is the internet (essentially based on the interaction between users and experts), which requires effective nomenclature in order to mediate between lay users and their restricted knowledge on the one, and experts and their sophisticated terminology on the other hand. At the interface between the new and complex realities and the need for simple linguistic access, a huge quantity of metaphoric denominations is used, making abstract innovations more comprehensible. Metaphor in the internet discourse serves to "reduce verticality" (Stenschke 2006) between specialized terminology and common language. The paper deals with metaphors based on spatial concepts. Space and spatiality play a key role in cognitive theories of metaphor asNo other means of communication determines through its seemingly unrestricted possibilities our everyday life more than the internet. From the mid-90s onwards, more and more technical advancements in the field of communication appear on the market, which in turn call for new terminology. In the first place, it is the internet (essentially based on the interaction between users and experts), which requires effective nomenclature in order to mediate between lay users and their restricted knowledge on the one, and experts and their sophisticated terminology on the other hand. At the interface between the new and complex realities and the need for simple linguistic access, a huge quantity of metaphoric denominations is used, making abstract innovations more comprehensible. Metaphor in the internet discourse serves to "reduce verticality" (Stenschke 2006) between specialized terminology and common language. The paper deals with metaphors based on spatial concepts. Space and spatiality play a key role in cognitive theories of metaphor as these theories themselves (according to Lakoff/Johnson 1980) are often based on the application of spatial concepts to non-spatial relations. After describing spatial concepts in general (referring to the internet), the paper explores which kind of metaphor takes advantage of the complexity present in the internet and how the medial space is linguistically recaptured in terms of spatial perception.…