15. Metaphor marking and metaphor typological and functional ranges in business periodicals

This chapter analyses the distribution of marked and unmarked metaphors (Goatly, 1997) within the typological and functional ranges identified in a corpus of business periodicals (Skorczynska & Deignan, 2006). The corpus contained approximately 400,000 words and was built from journalistic articles published in The Economist, Business Week, and Fortune. The metaphors analysed functionally in a previous study (Skorczynska & Deignan, 2006), and their co-text were searched for metaphorical markers (Goatly, 1997) with a concordancer. The results obtained show that there is no significant variation with regard to metaphor marking and metaphor types identified (active and inactive). However, there are notable correlations between metaphor marking and their functions (generic, filling terminological gaps, illustrating). This confirms an earlier finding that metaphor anticipation on the text level by means of linguistic expressions does not depend on the degree of metaphor conventionalisation, but rather on the context in which a particular text is produced (Cameron & Deignan, 2003)