How patent can patents be?: Exploring the impact of figurative language on the engineering patents genre
This paper examines the import of figurative language (specifically of conceptual and grammatical metaphors) in the discourse of engineering patents, a genre hardly researched for stylistic and pedagogical purposes and traditionally regarded as highly impersonal. To that end, a corpus
of over 300 US electro-mechanical patents has been analysed with the aid of a concordancing tool and applying a threefold convergent framework that gathers the metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978, 1985), the Applied Linguistic Approach to Metaphor (Low, 2008) and
the Metadiscursive Approach (Hyland, 2000, 2005). Findings reveal a complex network of metaphorical schemata, most non-deliberate, which constitute a tripartite choice dependent on the legal culture, the discipline and, to a lesser extent, on the authorial voice. It also binds patent writers
into a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) sharing a phraseological repertoire basically acquired by imitation and whose creative and confident use requires explicit instruction.
Keywords: community of practice; figurative language; metadiscourse systemic-functional metafunctions; patents
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2011
- Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association
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