Abstract

This study describes the quantitative aspects of metaphor in academic publications. In particular, we analyze the frequency of metaphor types and source domains in medical papers written by native and non-native speakers of English. The data have been collected from selected published articles on cancer and tissue engineering. The method combines a manual procedure with a semantic tagger and keyness statistics in Wmatrix software for metaphor identification. The results show that while the distribution of metaphor is relatively stable across tissue engineering and cancer articles written by native and non-native speakers, indirect metaphor is more often used than other types of metaphor. Moreover, the findings indicate that some metaphorical source domains are specifically used for a particular topic and that some are more frequently exploited by native speakers of English than by non-native speakers. This study has implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy and the development of metaphorical awareness activities as it may set the ground for future corpus studies that analyze metaphor properties in academic registers.

摘要

这项研究描述了学术出版物中隐喻的定量方面。特别是，我们分析英语母语人士和非母语人士撰写的医学论文中隐喻类型和来源域的频率。数据已从有关癌症和组织工程的精选发表文章中收集。该方法将手动过程与Wmatrix软件中的语义标记器和关键性统计信息相结合，以进行隐喻识别。结果表明，虽然隐喻的分布在组织工程和母语和非母语人士撰写的癌症文章中相对稳定，但间接隐喻比其他类型的隐喻更常用。此外，研究结果表明，某些隐喻的源域专门用于特定主题，并且某些以英语为母语的人而不是非母语的人来进行开发。这项研究对学术目的英语（EAP）教学法和隐喻意识活动的发展具有重要意义，因为它可能为将来分析学术名册中隐喻特性的语料库奠定基础。