A Corpus-based Study of Textual Metaphor in English Academic Writing
-
Qingshun He [1]
-
[1] Sun Yat-sen University
Sun Yat-sen University
China
-
- Localización: Studia linguistica: A journal of general linguistics, ISSN 0039-3193, Vol. 76, Nº 2, 2022, págs. 381-405
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
-
Resumen
This article conducted a corpus-based study on the discipline distributions of two types of textual metaphor identified by He et al. (2015) and He and Wen (2017), conjunctionalization of conjunctive adverbs and zero conjunctionalization of hypotactic conjunctions. It is found that conjunctionalization of conjunctive adverbs is more prevalent in soft science texts than in hard science texts and zero conjunctionalization of hypotactic conjunctions is similarly distributed in hard science texts and in soft science texts. However, conjunctionalization of conjunctive adverbs is more prevalent in native English linguistics texts than in EFL Chinese linguistics texts while zero conjunctionalization of hypotactic conjunctions dominates in EFL Chinese linguistics texts because of the relatively lower frequency of hypotactic clause complexes in EFL Chinese linguistics texts. Textual metaphor functions to increase the grammatical intricacy of text and hence is not a characteristic feature of scientific writing. It is hereby concluded that EFL Chinese linguists do not write as technical texts as native English linguists.
