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.