Análise da produção metafórica no Brazilian English Learner Corpus

Abstract

This study brings together theoretical assumptions from Corpus Linguistics and metaphor theories and aims at verifying variation in metaphor production by Brazilian English learners following a corpus-based approach. The corpus used for the investigation was the Brazilian English Leaner Corpus (BELC) (PACHECO, 2010), which is composed of four proficiency levels: (i) Beginner, (ii) Pre-Intermediate, (iii) Intermediate, and (iv) Advanced; and three types of task: (i) task 1 (descriptive text with personal information in 1st person), (ii) task 2 (descriptive text with personal information in 3rd person), and (iii) task 3 (narrative text about a trip). The corpus was manually annotated based on the procedures established by Cameron (2003) and by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). The metaphor frequency was later calculated using the software WordSmith tools (SCOTT, 2012), more specifically, the Concord tool. The research was organized in the following stages: (i) manual annotation of metaphor occurrences; (ii) extraction of metaphor frequency in the whole corpus and in its subcorpora; (iii) comparison of frequencies of use of linguistic metaphors in the three proficiency levels subcorpora; (iv) comparison of frequencies of use of linguistic metaphors in the four textual types subcorpora; (v) comparison of frequencies of use of linguistic metaphors in the twelve individual subcorpora. The significance levels of the frequency variations were calculated with the statistical test Log Likelihood. The results show that metaphor production increases at each proficiency level and varies according to the different text types: texts containing personal information in 3rd person tend to present higher frequency of metaphorical items when compared to personal narratives in 1st person, what corroborates findings from previous studies (BERBER SARDINHA, 2012).