A Comparative Study of Metaphorical Markers in Academic Research Articles

Although the use of metaphorical markers in corpora has been studied to a largeextent (e.g., Glucksberg & Keysar 1993; Skorczynska & Deignan, 2006; Sznjder,2005), no attempt to the best of the researchers' knowledge has been made todescribe metaphorical marking in a comparative analysis of 2 corpora in bothnational and international journals of applied linguistics in Iran. The gap envisagedhas prompted the researchers to formulate the hypothesis that metaphorical markingmay vary in different registers, as metaphor performs a variety of discoursefunctions. The present study, thus, aimed at showing the possible differences orsimilarities between published articles in Iranian and international journals ofapplied linguistics with regard to metaphorical markers, as classified and defined byGoatly (1997), in a data-driven study of articles with the Introduction, Method,Result, and Discussion (IMRD) sections. In order to identify the possible differencesor similarities among the journals, the frequency and the percentage of each markerin each journal were obtained. The results indicated that: (1) All the markers, moreor less, were used in both groups of journals, (2) the frequencies of explicit markers,superordinate terms, and misperception terms were less than other metaphoricalmarkers, and (3) the frequencies of using markers in the international journals weremore than the Iranian journals, although they were used in similar ways in bothgroups of journals.