Beyond idioms, the use of metaphor in ELF academic settings: A comprehensive review

Abstract

The ubiquity of metaphor in academic communication in English is well attested, as are the important ideational, interpersonal and textual functions it fulfils. It is thus surprising that this type of language use has received very little research attention in contexts where English is being used as Lingua Franca (ELF), as English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) is becoming ever more prevalent in higher education institutes across Europe. Here we review the existing research into metaphor in English in academic discourse and in ELF, finding that in the latter case, the focus has mostly been on idioms rather than metaphor more generally. We discuss the methodological issues that arise from attempts to describe the use of metaphor by non-native speakers of English (NNE) in academic contexts and introduce a new resource for studying this phenomenon in academic talk, the METCLIL corpus, which has been fully tagged for metaphor use. In turn, we summarise three research articles recently published in the Journal of Pragmatics which examine this corpus, looking at different types of metaphor use in nine Business and Marketing seminars in universities across Europe.