A corpus-based study of the correlation between text technicality and ideational metaphor in English

This article intends to conduct a corpus-based study on the correlation between technicality and two typical ideational metaphors in English texts, i.e., nominalization which is typical experiential metaphor and verbalization which is typical logical metaphor. A general distribution pattern of the typical ideational metaphors within the contexts of genre and discipline was investigated in the BNC. Based on this general pattern, the use of typical ideational metaphors was investigated, both in the academic papers of natural sciences and social sciences written by Chinese users of English as a foreign language (EFL) and those by native English users. The first investigation based on the BNC shows that typical ideational metaphors are not only genre sensitive but also discipline sensitive, and the technicality of text is determined by the use of verbalizations rather than by that of nominalizations. The second investigation based on the research papers shows that native English users write more technical English than EFL Chinese users, and among the four groups of research papers, the EFL Chinese science papers are farther from the native English science papers than the EFL Chinese linguistic papers from the native English linguistic papers in technicality. This research is of implication to the discipline-based English training of the non-native English learners. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.