The role of metaphor in communicating knowledge in academic discourse

This project investigated the role of (deliberate) metaphor in knowledge communication in academic discourse. It includes comprehensive qualitative metaphor analyses in a corpus of 23 US-American college lectures. The project uncovers the various forms and functions of deliberate metaphors that are used in lectures from four different disciplines (biology, chemistry, philosophy, and psychology). Furthermore, the debate about the contested notion of ‘deliberate metaphor’, a concept that is still in its infancy, is advanced by critical discussions of the identification and application of deliberate metaphors.