METAPHOR IMPACT ON RHETORICAL STRUCTURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF BULGARIAN AND INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH MEDICAL ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The current study aims to analyze research medical article introductions and the role metaphors play in them in a cross-cultural comparative setting. For that purpose, two corpora were selected - the first one being a selection of Bulgarian research medical article introductions and the second a respective set of international article introductions. All article were published in high impact factor journals. The study exploits Swales’ model of rhetorical genre analysis to achieve its main purpose – an in-depth investigation of metaphor typology and its role in rhetorical move structure in two different discourse settings. To that end, the research is based also on Lakoff & Johnsons’ division of conceptual metaphors into ontological, structural and orientational ones. The findings of the study illuminate some common traits to both sets of excerpted article introductions – Bulgarian and international. However, some notable differences were also found, mostly having its roots in the differences of the move structure in the respective article introductions, and also related to the different approaches which the specific cultural constraints have imposed. The study is all the more relevant, as it analyzes Bulgarian articles originally published in the Bulgarian language and translated into English. In this way some significant discrepancies in rhetorical structure and metaphor typology are more visible. The paper may be considered as an attempt to further develop the field of English for academic purposes. KEYWORDS: medical research article, rhetorical moves, conceptual metaphor typology, Bulgarian, English