engleski

Metonymy as an Impersonalisation Device in Medical Research Articles in English and Croatian

Medical research articles are vital for communication in medical sciences because they connect researchers with the scientific community. Authors try to persuade the audience that the presented results are reliable and true. Therefore, they use the scientific language which is supposed to be objective and impersonal. Besides the use of passive voice, metonymy is another device to mystify the discourse agents. In this study we investigated metonymy in medical research articles from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The analysis included medical research articles written in English and Croatian. The focus was on instances of metonymy in the location and production domains. In the location domain, the metonymic relations refer to STATE FOR INSTITUTION, STATE FOR INHABITANTSand INSTITUTION FOR PEOPLE WORKING THERE which are commonly used and lexicalized for research articles in English and Croatian. The main conceptual relation in the production domain was RESEARCH FOR AUTHOR. In this situation the researchers' names were not mentioned, and the research itself became the agent although the authors were understood to be the agents. The comparison of metonymies in English and Croatian showed that most metonymic situations were used equally in both languages. However, the English language used metonymy more frequently and in more conceptual relations than Croatian. Since the English scientific literature is available to Croatian scientists, the influence of the English scientific discourse is present in the Croatian scientific language which changes and develops parallel and new uses. Finally, we can say that metonymic relations are common in medical discourse and they are one of the characteristic features of scientific conceptualizations.

Croatian; English; metonymy; scientific discourse

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