Metaphors are a central component of institutional discourse. This phenomenon might be regarded as clashing with the language of institutions – a sort of transversal means of communication including law, economics, finance, etc. – that should exempt from ambiguity and respect the main lexical features of any LSP, such as lack of style and clarity. However, the language of institutions shows a large amount of figures of speech, being from time to time effective cognitive shortcuts, but also useless masks hindering communication. The first part of this work aims to describe metaphors retrieved from ECPREC, a corpus of about one million tokens assembled two years ago in order to investigate the language of EU press releases. The second part is focused on the analysis and the comparison of metaphors in English and Italian texts belonging to a corpus of more recent EU press releases comprising approximately 100.000 tokens. The main aim of this survey is to understand how metaphors are treated in the English and Italian languages.
Metafora e Vita Istituzionale
BARONE, LINDA
2008-01-01
Abstract
Metaphors are a central component of institutional discourse. This phenomenon might be regarded as clashing with the language of institutions – a sort of transversal means of communication including law, economics, finance, etc. – that should exempt from ambiguity and respect the main lexical features of any LSP, such as lack of style and clarity. However, the language of institutions shows a large amount of figures of speech, being from time to time effective cognitive shortcuts, but also useless masks hindering communication. The first part of this work aims to describe metaphors retrieved from ECPREC, a corpus of about one million tokens assembled two years ago in order to investigate the language of EU press releases. The second part is focused on the analysis and the comparison of metaphors in English and Italian texts belonging to a corpus of more recent EU press releases comprising approximately 100.000 tokens. The main aim of this survey is to understand how metaphors are treated in the English and Italian languages.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
