A Comparative Study of Metaphorical Markers in Academic Research Articles

Although the use of metaphorical markers in corpora has been studied to a large extent (e.g., Glucksberg & Keysar 1993; Skorczynska & Deignan, 2006; Sznjder, 2005), no attempt—to the best of the researchers‘ knowledge—has been made to describe metaphorical marking in a comparative analysis of 2 corpora in both national and international journals of applied linguistics in Iran. The gap envisaged has prompted the researchers to formulate the hypothesis that metaphorical marking may vary in different registers, as metaphor performs a variety of discourse functions. The present study, thus, aimed at showing the possible differences or similarities between published articles in Iranian and international journals of applied linguistics with regard to metaphorical markers, as classified and defined by Goatly (1997), in a data-driven study of articles with the Introduction, Method, Result, and Discussion (IMRD) sections. In order to identify the possible differences or similarities among the journals, the frequency and the percentage of each marker in each journal were obtained. The results indicated that: (1) All the markers, more or less, were used in both groups of journals, (2) the frequencies of explicit markers, superordinate terms, and misperception terms were less than other metaphorical markers, and (3) the frequencies of using markers in the international journals were more than the Iranian journals, although they were used in similar ways in both groups of journals.