High on metaphor, low on simile? An examination of metaphor type in sub-registers of academic prose

Recent corpus studies found that academic prose is particularly rich in metaphor, but exhibits an unexpectedly low proportion of forms of ‘direct metaphor’, such as simile (cf. Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, & Krennmayr, 2010a; Steen et al., 2010b). One explanation is deliberate metaphor use: in opposition to indirect forms (he attacked my argument), direct forms of metaphor (the leaf is shaped like a minaret) are normally explicitly signaled and often appear more vividly ‘metaphorical’. To control precision of linguistic reference, and to abide by an overarching stylistic maxim of academic prose that regulates marked figurativeness, writers of academic texts may thus try to delimitate deliberate metaphor use in the form of direct metaphor. However, recent advances in the study of English for Academic Purposes have stressed that the analysis of academic discourse cannot ignore ‘disciplinary specificity’ (cf. Hyland, 2009). Using an exploratory approach, the present chapter hence transgresses the rather broad unit of ‘register’ to zoom in on academic prose as specialist discourse of distinct ‘sub-registers’. Using the academic text sample (some 49,000 words) of the VUAMC (Steen et al. 2010c), it analyzes three metaphor types (indirect, implicit, and direct) across four different academic sub-registers (humanities arts, natural sciences, politics law education, social sciences). I report variation of metaphor type across the sub-registers, with the highest proportion of direct metaphors in natural sciences, followed by humanities arts. My findings on variation of metaphor type advances a finergrained view of metaphor use in academic prose, taking into account distinct communicative functions of metaphor types.