1 How patent can patents be? Exploring the impact of figurative language on the engineering patents genre Carmen Sancho Guinda and Ismael Arinas Pellón Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ABSTRACT This paper examines the import of figurative language (specifically of conceptual and grammatical metaphors) in the discourse of engineering patents, a genre hardly researched for stylistic and pedagogical purposes and traditionally regarded as highly impersonal. To that end, a corpus of over 300 US electro-mechanical patents has been analysed with the aid of a concordancing tool and applying a threefold convergent framework that gathers the metafunctions of Systemic Functional Lingustics (Halliday 1978, 1985), the Applied Linguistic Approach to Metaphor (Low 2008) and the Metadiscursive Approach (Hyland 2000, 2005). Findings reveal a complex network of metaphorical schemata, most non-deliberate, which constitute a tripartite choice dependent on the legal culture, the discipline and, to a lesser extent, on the authorial voice. It also binds patent writers into a community of practice (Wenger 1998) sharing a phraseological repertoire basically acquired by imitation and whose creative and confident use requires explicit instruction. Keywords: Patents, Figurative language, Community of practice, Metadiscourse Systemic-functional metafunctions
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How patent can patents be? Exploring the impact of figurative language
on the engineering patents genre
Carmen Sancho Guinda and Ismael Arinas Pellón
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the import of figurative language (specifically of conceptual and
grammatical metaphors) in the discourse of engineering patents, a genre hardly
researched for stylistic and pedagogical purposes and traditionally regarded as highly
impersonal. To that end, a corpus of over 300 US electro-mechanical patents has been
analysed with the aid of a concordancing tool and applying a threefold convergent
framework that gathers the metafunctions of Systemic Functional Lingustics (Halliday
1978, 1985), the Applied Linguistic Approach to Metaphor (Low 2008) and the
Metadiscursive Approach (Hyland 2000, 2005). Findings reveal a complex network of
metaphorical schemata, most non-deliberate, which constitute a tripartite choice
dependent on the legal culture, the discipline and, to a lesser extent, on the authorial
voice. It also binds patent writers into a community of practice (Wenger 1998) sharing
a phraseological repertoire basically acquired by imitation and whose creative and
confident use requires explicit instruction.
Keywords: Patents, Figurative language, Community of practice, Metadiscourse
Systemic-functional metafunctions
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1. Introduction and method: narrowing the focus of the Applied Metaphor Approach
Over the last two decades, a series of influential studies on the discursive application of
metaphor in the academic and political fields and in economics journalese (e.g. Cameron and
Low 1999, Cameron 2003, Charteris-Black 2004, Zanotto, Cameron and Cavalcanti 2008, White
2004) have paved the way for the current research into the pragmatic impact of tropes in
other specific professional discourses and even genres. The latest monographic issue of
Ibérica (Spring 2009), the journal of the European Association of Languages for Specific
Purposes, is a clear exponent of this shift of interest from the previous research on metaphor
and metonymy at a sentential level and within the exclusive domain of literature, to these
recent trends. Yet much remains to be investigated as to the functions performed by tropes in
the communication of specialized discourse communities, and even more so in those whose
discourses have been traditionally labelled as faceless. This paper attempts to bridge that gap
by exploring the discourse of engineering patents from a cognitive, metadiscursive and
systemic-functional perspective, and intends to serve a double purpose: didactic and
disciplinary. On the one hand, it tries to facilitate the comprehension and production of a
professional genre hardly accessed in the ESP classroom. On the other, to enrich the existing
descriptions of the genre through a blended framework virtually untapped in this type of
documents.
Our methodology comprises the scrutiny of a corpus of 333 US patents1 for
electromechanical devices granted from 1998 to 2009 (the most common inventions among
our technical colleagues at our polytechnic university) with the aid of the concordancing
program AntConc 3.2.1w (Anthony 2007)2 and the application of a threefold theoretical
framework in which Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1978, 1985), henceforth SFL, the
Applied Linguistic Approach to Metaphor (Low 2008) and the Metadiscursive Approach
(Hyland 2000, 2005) converge. To avoid unnecessary taxonomical complexities we simplified
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the SFL framework to its three semantic metafunctions (i.e. ideational, interpersonal, textual)3,
under which the metaphorical and metonymic occurrences and their pragmatic functions may
be classified and discussed. Likewise, following Low’s deconstruction of metaphors in book
reviews, the Applied Metaphor Approach will draw on the traditional metaphorical schemata
proposed by Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Theory of Metaphor (1980). Finally, we will pay
special attention to the interplay between the metadiscursive functions of boosting
(foregrounding) and hedging (mitigation) as the internal strategic workings underlying the text.
2. A systemic overview of the genre
Lexicographic sources broadly define ‘patent’ as an official licence or right from the
government granting a person or business the right to make or sell a particular article for a
certain period, and by extension the term may refer to the invention so protected (Chambers
Giant Dictionary and Thesaurus 2007: 556). However, from a linguistics standpoint and
attending to our convergent framework, patents seem to mean much more. To begin with, the
ideational content of any patent document must fulfil three validity criteria: utility, feasibility
and novelty in combination with non-obviousness (in Europe called inventive step). Simply put,
inventors must realistically solve problems and plug lacks left by previous patents (the prior
art) in the same technical field and present a new product whose purpose and applications
should not be inferred from previous patent inventions or their combined elements, all this
claim as much exclusivity as possible without trespassing somebody else’s turf. In essence,
these three ruling principles coincide with those observed by Hyland (2000: 176) in research
articles: relevance, credibility and novelty. In our case, an invention is relevant when useful,
and the claiming of its property tacitly entails technical feasibility, which is but a sort of
credibility. The notion of maximum property needs clarification though: Whom does it really
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affect or condition? Certainly it is no validity criterion for patent examiners, judges or lawyers
when dealing with the foreseeable legal effects of a patent application and litigation might be
involved, precisely because the ownership claimed seems excessive. Conversely, it is a validity
criterion for inventors and investors, who aspire to the amplest property and with it to the
most substantial profits.
As to the information conveyed by the text in accordance with these validity criteria,
the online brochure of the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation)4 distinguishes
three main informative strands: technical (provided by the description and drawings), legal
(contained in the claims) and business-relevant (bibliographical data such as the title of the
invention, patent date, names of the inventors and patent examiners, attorneys or agents, and
references to former similar patents and other technical documents). The structure of these
sections or ‘headings’ (bibliographical data, description and drawings—these latter in a
separate section), are strictly dictated by the codes and regulations of each country. In the
USA, for example, patent applications must abide by the ‘Consolidated Patent Rules’, Title 37
of the US Code of Federal Regulations (CPR37 for short) and Title 35 of the United States Code
(USC35). The patent applicants use as a reference for their application the Manual of Patent
Examining Procedures, abbreviated as MPEP.5
In the light of Genre Analysis (Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993, Bazerman 1999), the textual
component of every patent involves a number of moves or rhetorical shifts that may span
across several sections or ‘headings’ in the text. Arinas (2009) distinguished five basic moves
that could be entitled property scope, field and application, gaps in the prior art, physical and
functional description and cautionary statements. Their functions and sections most likely to
embrace them are shown in the table below.
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MOVES FUNCTIONS SECTIONS
Property scope Delimit the invention, setting of boundaries
Claims
Field and application Indication of finality and context of the invention
Brief summary of the invention
Gaps in prior art
Antecedents (previous related inventions) and their evaluation
Background of the invention or prior art
Physical and functional description
Display of components and explanation of how they work
Detailed description (may include drawings/graphics)
Cautionary statements
Optional alternatives and specifications about the versatility of format and applications
Table 1: Rhetorical moves in the patent document and sections usually associated
Lastly, the interpersonal meaning transmitted by patents is subjected to a subtle
interplay of two strategic workings: hedging and boosting, which operate at a metadiscursive
level (Hyland 2000, 2005). While hedges emphasize subjectivity, are open to negotiation and
alternative viewpoints and withhold commitment to propositions, boosters highlight certainty,
do not leave room for other opinions and mark involvement and solidarity with the addressee.
In patents hedging is fundamentally oriented towards imprecision and boosting towards a
promotional evaluations and an apparent solidarity with the reader which is actually intended
to avoid litigation. Let us think, for instance, of the vague language commonly employed in the
denomination of well-known patented objects, such as vacuum cleaners (e.g. cyclonic
separating apparatus, dust collection unit, mulcher, etc.) or in the interactional formulas ‘One
skilled in the art will appreciate that…’, ‘It will be understood by those skilled in the art that …’.
Imprecise language is aimed at expanding property boundaries and thus dissuading
competitors from venturing into the same area, whereas solidarity metadiscourse might be
interpreted in two possible ways. One, as a deferential cognitive directive act (Hyland 2008)
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telling the non-expert reader how to understand highly technical information without vetoing
his/her inclusion into the circle of experts, and the other as a litigation deterrent using
supposedly shared knowledge as shield. Interpersonal meaning, the least stable of the three
SFL metafunctions in the patent genre, intersects and overlaps with the ideational and textual
components, more constitutive of the genre, and provides a slight chance for variation by
means of stance and engagement markers: for example through metadiscourse items such as
attitude markers, recapitulators, code glosses and inferentials, these last three processing
information for the reader instead of letting the facts speak for themselves. Most often this
variation tends to be ‘idiolectal’ since it happens to concentrate on very few patent
documents.
3. Metaphorical schemata in the patent context
We might begin by wondering what Cognitive Linguistics has to say about such a specialized
genre. As any other communicative event, patents agglutinate several metaphorical schemata
and an active interaction between mental spaces, two operations of undoubted interest to the
cognitive analyst. But why is it relevant to make them explicit in our engineering environment?
Our point is that the insertion of cognitive features in a functional framework may become a
helpful mnemonic tool for students to 1) retain and handle high-frequency phraseology, 2)
understand better the promotional strategies resorted to in order to achieve patentability and
3) find ways to empowerment in patent writing by exercising their creativity as genre users.
Let us examine the diverse cognitive features in each of the SFL metafunctions.
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3.1 Ideational cognitive features
On the ideational plane, the conceptual schema INVENTIONS/DEVICES ARE LIVING
ORGANISMS stands out quantitatively and establishes a metaphorical coherence which,
although unintended, may prove an aid to vocabulary acquisition. The USC35 and the CPR37
mention the term embodiment to denote the best mode or version of an invention, and as a
generic metaphor its raw frequency of occurrence is high (7,365 tokens). Related bodily
metaphors, discipline-bound, are for instance body, limbs, (long)life, experience, grow/growth,