Metaphor and Genre: The Presence and Role of Metaphor in the Building Review

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with metaphors used by architects as illustrated in the genre of the building review. The analysis is done on a corpus of 95 texts drawn from six architectural design magazines, and focuses on (a) the grammatical instantiation of the metaphors, (b) the locus of occurrence within the genre's rhetorical structure, and (c) the purposes they fulfil in the genre. The conclusion is that architects make active use of both conceptual and image metaphors in order to fulfil the two defining purposes of the review genre, namely, describe and evaluate. In this sense, metaphor is regarded not only as a constitutive part of architects' jargon, but also as an important rhetorical device at the service of the goals of that specific discourse interaction (covering issues of writer–reader relationship and textual coherence and cohesion). Finally, the discussion also addresses the knotty issue of metaphor classification and proposes a combination of cognitive and discourse procedures in order to approach the differences between metaphor types.

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