This article aims to analyse different ways of conceptualization that emerge from interactions among professors, students, and teaching assistants through a group of discussion into the Facebook. The groundings adopted were provided by the complex adaptive system theory and also by the systematic metaphor approach. The identification of metaphors was based in the proceedings defined in Cameron (2009) that are an adaptation of the metaphor identification process (MIP). In addition, an applied quantitative analysis was conducted, using a Chi-squared test. The union of these proceedings has allowed to describe systematic metaphors having knowledge as a central theme, considering that the data collection occurred into a context in which the academic genre research project was discussed among professors and students who participated in Reading and Writing Academic Genres (RWAG) classes in a Language Course at the Federal University of Ceara. The results of the analysis show the emergency of two systematic metaphors, and that the type of linguistic metaphors that professors produce to refer to the discursive topic knowledge differs to the type of linguistic metaphors that student produce to refer to the same topic.
complexity; systematic metaphors; social networkings
