Economy is a living organism Metaphorical expressions in a learner corpus of English Emilia Castaño, Isabel Verdaguer, Natalia Judith Laso, Aaron Ventura Revista Espanola De Linguistica Aplicada, 2014 This paper presents results from a qualitative corpus-based study on Spanish EFL learners’ metaphorical production. The analysis of a learner corpus of business English, which included essays written by undergraduates, showed that learners do make use of metaphorical language and that the metaphorical expressions identified in their texts — economy/business is a living organism, business is war, business is a relationship, and economic success and failure are movements on a vertical axis — match those used by native speakers, as stated in the literature (Burcea, 2010; Kovács, 2006; Kövecses, 2002; White, 2003; among others). In addition, data also confirmed that even in learner’s language metaphors are connected in large networks within the same text, which contribute to enhancing text global coherence, as pointed out by Semino (2008). Finally, the potential benefits of raising learners’ metaphorical awareness and making explicit to them cross-linguistic differences in the expression of general conceptual metaphors are highlighted.
As described below a corpus-based approach to the verb describe in scientific English Aaron Ventura Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 2013 This case study aims to investigate the relevance, as well as the use, of the lexical verb describe in scientific research articles, so as to determine the degree of importance of such a guiding verb within this type of discourse and within the scientific process itself. A detailed exploration of the complementation patterns is also made so as to give account of the environment in which such a verb tends to appear. This linguistic information asserts that in most cases the structure formed by the verb describe and its patterns serve to locate the reader, either spatially or temporally. This guiding function becomes essential for the reader of the scientific paper since it helps him/her process the information provided adequately. Furthermore, a comparison between the use of describe on the one hand, and some delexicalised verbs of ‘receiving’ and ‘giving’ followed by the nominal form description, on the other, is made, showing thereby a clear-cut preference for the use of the verbal form.
A cross-disciplinary analysis of personal and impersonal features in English and Spanish scientific writing Danica Salazar, Aaron Ventura, Isabel Verdaguer Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 2013 This study is a corpus-based, cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary analysis of impersonal and personal constructions in scientific texts. Passive structures (to be + past participle) and personal expressions (first-person pronouns) were extracted from a corpus of research articles taken from an English medical journal and a similar corpus of articles from an English mathematics journal. Corresponding Spanish passive constructions (se + active verb form and ser + past participle) and personal structures (verbs ending in -mos, first-person pronouns) were searched for in a corpus of medical research articles and a corpus of mathematics articles from Spanish-language journals. The frequency and patterns of use of both impersonal and personal features are compared across the four corpora to identify language- and discipline-specific preferences. The qualitative analysis of these structures sheds light on the textual functions they perform in different sections of the text. The results of the study demonstrate that in both English and Spanish, the choice between personal and impersonal constructions depends largely on the discipline and the author’s rhetorical aims. While the empirical, experiment-based field of Medicine is characterised by a prevalence of passive features that serve to reduce authorial presence in the description of scientific procedures, there is a marked preference for personal rather than impersonal forms in the more abstract, logic-based discipline of Mathematics, where authors are expected to guide their readers through an often convoluted chain of reasoning.
