Arab Educational Information Network

The present study is an investigation of Metaphor Production in some master dissertations at the department of English of Mouloud Mammeri University. Its main aim is to find out the frequency of metaphors’ use by literature and linguistics students. It also attempts to unveil the three dominant metaphors produced and check whether the linguistic context influences metaphor production. To achieve these goals we have adopted the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) method to identify and collect the metaphors produced by students and to construct the corpus. The corpus of this research includes ten (10) dissertations from literature and linguistics disciplines submitted in 2017 at the department of English of Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou. The collected data consist of a total of 680 metaphorical linguistic expressions. The results of this investigation show that master students extensively produce metaphors in writing their academic works. They also reveal that the basic level metaphors “IDEAS ARE PEOPLE”, “IDEAS ARE OBJECTS” and “THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS” are the three most produced metaphors in the two disciplines. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that the linguistic context has an influence on the production of metaphors. (Author’s abstract)