Metaphor in scientific business journals and business periodicals: an example of the scientific dicourse popularisation

Studies of metaphor have largely focused on its formal features and meaning in different types of spoken and written texts. This is to the exclusion of a contrastive analysis of metaphor variation in two types of discourse and its implications for the process of the scientfic discourse popularisation. An attempt is made in this study to describe metaphor variation at three discourse levels: conceptual, linguistic and communicative in two corpora: one based on scientific business journals and the other, on business periodicals. Results obtained indicate that metaphor variation is a part of the popularisation process and ocrresponds to its three characteristics: simplifivation, the use of informal tone and reformulation, besides its employment as a narrative device