Metaphor in academic discourse: Linguistic forms, conceptual structures, communicative functions and cognitive representations

formal, academic one. The identification of the contextual meaning of this lexical item yields ‘[FORMAL] to study something’ (Macmillan’s sense no. 4, or MM4). In the next step we identify the basic meaning as ‘to examine an area of land in order to make a map of it’ (MM3). Since the latter is distinct from, but can be understood in comparison with, the contextual sense, survey is a metaphorically used word. There is a special feature of survey in this context. The tension between abstract and concrete is combined with a tension between non-human and human. That is, the contextual sense of survey has a selection restriction that requires a human agent in subject position, but this is violated by the appearance of a non-human agent. The dictionary provides an example included in the contextual sense (MM4): Professor Arens has surveyed a wide range of tribal cultures. It illustrates the semantic restriction of having to select a human agent for survey in the sense of ‘to study something’. This selection restriction is violated in our example sentence, and can be treated as a case of personification. Although personification of this kind seems to be rather typical of academic discourse, frequently being used for text management, there is a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate usage that cannot be transgressed without marking the language as stylistically deficient or conceptually unsound. Low (2005) shows that expressions like “this essay thinks” (which he relates to the conceptual mapping AN ESSAY IS A PERSON) are not accepted by experienced lecturers, while other cases, as we have seen, are perfectly acceptable. It should also be noted that the reported type of personification is closely tied to metonymy and is therefore substantially different from personifications like “each individual cell had to be master of all trades” (from an article in the popularized science journal New Scientist, identified by Low, 2005). The latter is a type of personification that seems to be used for distinct functions, such as explanation and entertainment (cf. Low, 2005). The next lexical item identified as related to metaphor is development. In previous discussions among the analysts, it had been classified as a borderline case. The decision to regard the item as borderline was most likely prompted by the analysts’ lexical knowledge about concrete instances of development, such as the growth of a plant. However, there is no such entry to be found in Macmillan. The dictionary rather lists a fairly universal meaning of development: ‘change, growth, or improvement over a period of time’ (MM1). The entry conflates the basic concrete meaning with more encompassing (‘growth of a child as time passes, as it 112 | C h a p t e r 4 changes and learns to do new things’, MM1a) and more abstract (‘improving the economy [.]’, MM1b) meanings. What is more, even the contextual meaning is subsumed under the universal meaning of MM1. Given this strong general sense of development, the lexical item was later re-analyzed as a non-metaphorical item. At the time of the reliability testing, however, the discussion of development was still pending. All analysts indicated their awareness of this status by assigning borderline status. The last metaphorical item included in this sentence is the preposition over. The contextual sense is ‘during a period of time’, which can be contrasted and metaphorically compared to ‘above someone/something’. All coders agreed on this comparison. Over is thus a maximally straightforward instance of metaphor. At this point, we can make the following observations about identifying metaphor in academic discourse. We observed that metaphor in academic writing often involves forms of personification (cf. Low, 1999). And, including rather than excluding borderline cases of metaphoricity is important for metaphor identification in academic registers, too. We will now turn to our treatment of a number of less clear cases. 4.2 Lack of Agreement 4.2. 1 Metaphor identification and specialist terms: Metaphorical to whom? Our reliability tests show that academic texts (together with news texts) have the highest rate of unanimously identified metaphors of the four registers (cf. Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr, & Pasma, 2010). Most words related to metaphor found in our samples of academic discourse are straightforward cases of conventional metaphor. They are not ambiguous and they are a typical part of academic prose. But academic discourse also exhibits the highest proportion of coder disagreement. This seems to be related to one of the intrinsic qualities of many metaphors in academic discourse, their degree of specialization. There are a number of implications. The British National Corpus reflects the high level of specialization of academic discourse by differentiating between four sub-registers: humanities & arts, natural sciences, politics, law, & education, and social sciences. The fragments representing academic discourse belong to distinct sub-registers, which have their own specialized vocabulary. This is one axis of specialization. In addition, Biber (2006b) also distinguishes between various “academic levels (lower division, upper division, graduate)” (2006, p. 21). This categorization relates to different audiences using words (especially technical terms) with distinct levels of expertise. This is another M e t a p h o r i d e n t i f i c a t i o n i n a c a d e m i c d i s c o u r s e | 113 axis of specialization. Both types of specialization may cause problems for reliable metaphor identification. Each academic discipline has a specific technical language, which features many possible candidates for metaphorically related words. However, the detailed shades of meanings of technical languages are not part and parcel of the general reader’s lexical knowledge, and correspondingly, cases of disagreement in the reliability test were often from technical vocabulary. The technical meanings of words like scalar (from scalar function in electromagnetics, FEF-fragment02) are not frequent enough to figure in Macmillan. This is a special methodological problem of academic discourse, which at first glance does not seem to be resolved by MIPVU’s practice of consulting a usage-based dictionary to support coder decisions. To correctly establish the contextual meaning for technical terms like electrical charge or scalar function, analysts would need to gather information from more encompassing dictionaries, such as the OED, or genuinely specialized dictionaries. Our solution for dealing with cases like these was to adopt a general view on metaphor, which means that we assume a general reader. This reader’s knowledge about the meaning of words is taken to correspond with the entries in the Macmillan dictionary, or, as a fallback position, Longman (Summers & Bullon, 2005). Decisions should therefore not be based on etymological principles (charge) or solely on specialized dictionaries (scalar). We thus decided to stick to our general identification procedure, and base our decisions primarily on Macmillan. Since specialized terms do not appear in our dictionaries, and we deliberately did not include an additional step for assessing the specific contextual meaning of a lexical unit in the procedure, we cannot compare the exact contextual meaning to an assumed more basic meaning. However, just like the general language user, analysts do have intuitions about the approximate sense of a technical term, in particular about its abstractness and so on. Therefore, if the contextual sense of a specialized term is not in the dictionary, but there is a sense that fulfills our criteria of being basic, and that can be understood by comparison to the (assumed) contextual sense, we mark the word as a borderline case of metaphor (WIDLII) –“borderline” because we have not checked the contextual sense against a specialist dictionary. 4.2. 2 Metaphor-related words and scientific models. In this section we will examine how our linguistic approach interacts with any knowledge we may have of the structure of underlying metaphorical scientific models. In particular, the question arises whether it can interfere with achieving unanimous agreement. One example of words that seem to indicate a scientific model is (electrical) charge: 114 | C h a p t e r 4 (2) It means that neither the magnitude nor the position of the charge varies as a function of time. (FEF-fragment02, emphasis mine, JBH) The contextual meaning is sense description 4 in Macmillan, ‘the amount of electricity that something holds or carries’, which is unproblematic. But when we have to identify the basic meaning of the word, it is difficult to make a decision. The summary for this entry looks like this: 1. amount of money to pay; 2. when sb [somebody, JBH] is accused; 3. an attack running fast; 4. amount of electricity; 5. amount of explosive; 6. sb you take care of; 7. ability to cause emotion. Longman provides no further information. Candidates for a basic meaning are the bodily-related ‘an attack by people or animals running very fast towards someone or something’ (MM3) and the concrete ‘an amount of the substance that makes a bomb explode’ (MM5). By adding the label WIDLII to our judgment that this word is related to metaphor, we can signal borderline status. We thereby account for the possibility that the general reader might judge one of these senses basic. The OED features the concrete, physical sense of ‘a (material) load, burden, weight’, which is now obsolete. It also provides us with the approximate date of the first usage of load in the electrical sense; this enables us to infer that, when the term was coined as part of a scientific model, the concrete, physical meaning was still part of the English lexicon. It is possible that today there is still available a model of electricity that works on the basis of an analogy between concrete material loads and less palpable