A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres
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Hanna Skorczynska is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). Her research interests include the use of metaphor in specialized discourse, cross-cultural professional communication, and genre variation in professional contexts, on which she has published journal articles and book chapters.
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Kathleen Ahrens is a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her main areas of research are conceptual metaphor representation and processing, and lexical ambiguity representation and processing. She has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters in journals such as
Brain & Language ,Metaphor & Symbol ,Discourse & Society , andthe Journal of Psycholinguistic Research . She also editedPolitics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors , which was published by Palgrave-Macmillan (2009).
Abstract
This study examines the use of words and phrases that signal metaphors in three genres in order to further examine the corpus-based evidence for signaling variation mentioned in previous research. While previous studies have focused on pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and the level of conventionalization, this study demonstrates that the communicative goals within each genre underlie the reasons for the metaphor signaling. Three corpora of approximately 600,000 words were created for this research, and they were made up of US presidential addresses, popular science articles, and business periodical articles. The corpora were electronically queried for the use of sixteen previously identified metaphor signals in order to obtain comparable quantitative data. The study was complemented by a qualitative analysis of the identified instances of signaled metaphors. We found that three metaphor signal categories – copular similes, verbal processes, and modals/conditionals – accounted for the large majority of the signals analyzed in the genres. Furthermore, we found that while copular similes and verbal processes signals were used for different rhetorical purposes, depending on the communicative goals of each genre, the conditional signal was always used to foreshadow metaphorically expressed possibilities, regardless of the genre in which it was used.
About the authors
Hanna Skorczynska is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). Her research interests include the use of metaphor in specialized discourse, cross-cultural professional communication, and genre variation in professional contexts, on which she has published journal articles and book chapters.
Kathleen Ahrens is a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her main areas of research are conceptual metaphor representation and processing, and lexical ambiguity representation and processing. She has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters in journals such as Brain & Language, Metaphor & Symbol, Discourse & Society, and the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. She also edited Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors, which was published by Palgrave-Macmillan (2009).
Acknowledgments
The first author would like to thank Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) for the grant (BEST/2009/243) supporting this research. The second author would like to thank Hong Kong Baptist University for a Faculty Research Grant which supported a portion of this research (FRG/08-09/II-27). Special thanks also go to the second author’s project assistant, Ivy Chan Wing Shan, for her assistance with the data analysis in this paper. We are grateful for comments and suggestions received from two anonymous reviewers. All errors are our own responsibility.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Topical themes and thematic progression: the “picture” of research articles
- Domains of study and genres in late seventeenth-century science: evidence from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1675)
- Scapegoat or manipulated victim? Metaphorical representations of the Sino-US currency dispute in Chinese and American financial news
- A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres
- Lexical realization of attitudinal meaning and its coding in discourse analysis
- In pursuit of some appreciation: assessment and group membership in children’s second stories
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Topical themes and thematic progression: the “picture” of research articles
- Domains of study and genres in late seventeenth-century science: evidence from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1675)
- Scapegoat or manipulated victim? Metaphorical representations of the Sino-US currency dispute in Chinese and American financial news
- A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres
- Lexical realization of attitudinal meaning and its coding in discourse analysis
- In pursuit of some appreciation: assessment and group membership in children’s second stories
