A Corpus‐Based Study of Idioms in Academic Speech

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90255/1/3588398.pd

Bathtubs, black holes and kitchen sinks: Metaphor in academic speech.

This study is an investigation of metaphor in academic speech, a discursive register that has only recently drawn the attention of discourse analysts and applied linguists. The study contends that neither a purely linguistic nor a purely cognitive approach is adequate for understanding the role of metaphor in this real-world context. Instead, it argues for combining the two approaches as suggested by Cameron and Low (1999a, 1999b) and Cameron (2003a). This requires viewing metaphor as a linguistic phenomenon with cognitive underpinnings. In Chapters 2 and 3, the perception and use of metaphor is approached from a discourse participant's perspective; it thus moves away from previous approaches that analyze metaphor from the perspective of an analyst or theorist. Forty-nine coders representing at least seven different languages were asked to identify metaphors in authentic linguistic data extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The outcomes of the coding study suggest that, despite cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences, a high degree of systematicity in terms of metaphor identification ensues when coders' awareness of metaphor is enhanced prior to the coding, the one exception being phrasal verbs and verb + preposition combinations. In Chapter 4, a qualitative analysis of epistemic and communicative uses of metaphor typical of academic speech is followed by a quantitative analysis that identifies a conceptual metaphor found to be frequent in the research corpus---ACADEMIC PURSUITS HAVE DESTINATIONS. Linguistic realizations of this metaphor in the corpus are discussed in terms of slots, distribution, users, contexts of use and pragmatic functions. The study concludes by recommending that some instruction on the use of metaphor in academic speech be included in English for Academic Purposes programs. To this end, a set of corpus-based teaching materials is presented, based on the rationale that for maximum effectiveness, pedagogical materials must approximate the target discourse as closely as possible.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124131/2/3121996.pd