Metaphor in Academic Writing: A Report from Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

Metaphors are central to academic writing and scientific theorizing. To create awareness about the features of metaphor in English academic writing, this study investigated frequency, types, and key categories of metaphor in published articles of non-native speakers and compared them with those of native speakers. The data have been collected from 50 research articles with the topic of cancer and gene silencing. For description of frequency and types of metaphors, a sample section of articles was coded with manual metaphor identification procedure and for identification of key categories, a semi-automatic procedure including of software and manual analysis was conducted. Findings suggested that similar to the writing of native speakers, metaphor was a highly pervasive phenomenon in 2nd language academic writing of non-native speakers and indirect metaphor in comparison to direct and implicit metaphors led the rank type of metaphoricity. The results, however featured more number of key metaphor categories with higher variety of metaphorical words in the written discourse of non-native speakers.