Metaphorical language in specialized and popular scientific texts

This study positions itself within the domain of analysing metaphor in naturally-occurring data. The use of metaphor often varies depending on many factors such as the context in which it is used, topic, audience, mode of communication and so on. This study specifically aims at investigating the differences and similarities in the use of metaphorical expressions between specialized and popular scientific texts. The research is based on the analysis of eight articles coming from four scientific disciplines: exact, life, social sciences, and humanities. A pair of texts comes from each discipline, one being a popular science article written by journalists for the general public, and the other being a research article written by scientists for their peers. All metaphorical language in the articles was identified using MIPVU, a systematic and transparent procedure for identifying linguistic metaphor. The findings indicate a pronounced difference in linguistic metaphor use between the two related text-types. These differences concern the frequencies, types, and functions of metaphorical language use. The variations in the use of metaphor proved to be largely explainable in terms of the differences in the components of genre and register.