Metáforas no português acadêmico

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and discuss the use of metaphors in undergraduate academic Portuguese, assuming that the conceptual system of the human being is fundamentally metaphorical in nature (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). According to Herrmann (2013), metaphor plays a crucial role in academic discourse and it has been discussed in the academic environment. In the last decades, different perspectives have been studied metaphor phenomenon, like Linguistics, Psychology, Anthropology, Computer Science and their interfaces. In order to address the issue in academic Portuguese and promote a characterization of this type of genre, as well as assist Brazilian and foreign students in relation to education and Portuguese language learning, we analyzed a corpus consisting of academic articles published by undergraduate students (native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese) from a private university of Brazil. These articles were chosen from two different academic areas: Communication and Computer Science. From the corpus analysis, we could observe that the areas studied seem to use metaphors in different ways, with different characteristics in each of them.