A Comparative Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Political and Scientific Texts

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IN GOD WE
TRUST

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A Comparative Study of Ideational
Grammatical Metaphor in Political and
Scientific Texts
Superviser: Dr. Behnam
Advisor: Dr. Ghafoori
by Bahram Kazemian

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Introduction
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
1. is a grammatical description developed by
Michael Halliday (1985).
2. Systemic: the view of language as a network
of systems, or interrelated sets of options for
making meaning.
3. Functional: refers to the view of language as
a means of communication in different social
contexts.
4. SFL focuses not only on how language is
structured but also language in use.

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Grammatical Metaphor (GM)
is a substitution of one grammatical class, or
one grammatical structure, by another:
his departure instead of he departed.
Actions are presented in a noun phrase.
Simply, activities or processes, which would
naturally be expressed by verbs, become
things.
interpersonal GM, and ideational GM: 2
types of GM

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Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM):
includes the process and the nominalization.
IGM is an incongruent representation of the
experiential meaning. It is mainly represented
by the transitivity system.
there are six main types of process : material,
mental, relational, behavioral, verbal and
existential processes

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1. Knowing how to use GM in academic registers
is an essential part of developing academic
language.
2. It Can help students, translators to transfer these
features from one language into the other.
3. Not expressing their meaning in informal and
simple ways
4. Raising students' awareness regarding the role
and function of grammatical metaphor in
written texts
Statement of the problem and the
purpose

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Significance and Justification of the
study
1. Raising the consciousness of teachers,
translators and EFL instructors as well as
students with regard to the role of GM.
2. Helping the students to identify the
congruent and metaphorical forms.
3. Developing students’ awareness of the
characteristics of written English, and
academic writing
4. Hopefully paving the other researchers' way
in further research and intriguing them in
the realm of SFL and GM

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Functional Grammar
1. is a way of looking at the grammar in terms
of how grammar is used.
2. it provides you with the tools for
understanding why a text is the way it is.
3. It respects the speaker's rights to make up
their own minds about how they choose to
talk
4. It is communicative grammar that learners
can take out of the classroom
5. a grammar of meanings, in which grammar
is viewed not as a set of rules, but as a
communicative resource

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Metafunctions
1. metafunctions of language are major
functions of language.
2. Halliday's Functional Grammar is based
on the idea that language performs three
major functions:
Metafunction is construed by Lexico-grammar
ideational Transitivity System
interpersonal mood & modality
textual theme

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Grammatical Metaphor (GM)
refer to the meaning transference from
congruent to metaphorical in grammar.
Congruent forms reflect the typical ways
that people construe experience.
People often use verbs into nouns,
adjectives into nouns and turn sentences into
noun phrases, these changes are called GM.

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Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM):
1. is an metaphorical representation of the
ideational meaning. It is mainly represented
by the transitivity system.
2. uses the form of the noun to express the
process or quality which should be
expressed by the verbs and adjectives.
3. Includes process types and Nominalization.
4. Nominalization has been known as the
single most powerful resource for creating
IGM.

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Nominalization
1. processes (congruently worded as verbs)
and properties (congruently worded as
adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as
nouns
2. Numerous usage in political and scientific
texts.
3. Its functions: density, complexity,
abstractness, encapsulation, technicality and
rationality.
4. An indicator of academic and formal
writing.

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Transitivity system(process types)
1. Transitivity choices involve selections from
various process types that are realized in
verbal groups
2. transitivity as an ideational feature which
serves to linguistically construct the goings-on
of the real world.
3. Six types: Material (processes of doing),
Mental (processes of sensing), Relational
(processes of being), Behavioral (physiological
and psychological behavior), Verbal (processes of
saying), and Existential (process of existence).

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Procedure
1. Thorough reading of the texts & IGM’s
identification.
2. Rendering GM in Congruent expression.
3. Unpacking GM was based on inventories
represented by: Eggins, Halliday, Halliday
and Mathiessen, Martin et al and
Thompson.
4. Recognition of process types in congruent.
5. Calculating the data and Drawing tables
and graphs

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Design
The design of the present study was
descriptive-analytic which concentrated
on the frequency of occurrences of IGM
(nominalizations) and their congruent
wording in scientific and political texts.
As a model of analysis, Hallidyan
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
model of text analysis is utilized as a
yardstick to analyze the process types of
clauses

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IGM in political texts:
1. politics is a struggle for power in order to
put certain political, economic and social
ideas into practice.
2. language plays a crucial role, and it is
prepared, accompanied, influenced and
played by language.
3. Using various devices like: hyperbole,
slogans and nominalization etc..
4. Manipulating meaning and coloring our
perception of political trends to persuade
us of political realities.

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Woods (2006) argued that
1. Nominalization in political texts has the
effect of making the second expression
sound more impersonal or remote than the
first.
2. our attention is diverted from the process
that is actually occurring and directed
instead to the product of the process, e.g.
1. We are simply being tested by the force of
change. The pace of change can … So what is
the challenge? It is that change is marching on
again .

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Functions of Nominalization
1. making actions or processes become concepts
e.g. the choice of a nominalization (choose to
nominalize)
2. Packing a single sentence in several complex
abstract ideas e.g. … security and immigration
reform.
3. building long noun phrases to produce a lexically
dense style e.g.
a. the Universe and its origins (and how the
universe has originated) and
b. …with their courage, strength and wisdom
(and are courageous, are strong and are wise)

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No. Metaphorical wording Congruent wording
Process
type
Frequency
in per text
1 urban disorder the urban area was disordered material 8
2 cause shock people were shocked by mental 1
3
The gross negligence of
certain regions
certain regions were grossly
neglected/negligent by…
material 1
4
and a demonstration at the
police station
and people demonstrated at
the police station
material 1
5 strident demand
to demand something
stridently
verbal 1
6 Queen’s coronation and the queen was coroneted material 2
7 constituency over the issue to be constituent over … relational 1
8 immigration to the UK
people have immigrated to the
UK
material 1
9
development of the
international organization
to develop international
organization
material 1

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Functions of Nominalization
4. Reducing the number of clauses and more info is
able to be compressed into each nominal group
e.g. Benazir's assassination at a campaign rally
5. When verbs are nominalised they become
concepts rather than actions; the writer can
increase in the amount and density of
information: (The company decided to expand its
asset base and it has significantly shifted …)
6. enables an academic writer to concisely refer to
recurring abstract ideas

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Compound Grammatical Metaphor
1. some sentences employ more than one
grammatical metaphor in order to produce
a desirable effect:
motivated by greed or excitement, the
dupes of political extremists, or imitating
the behavior of others
2. 556 instances of IGMs were extracted.
Materia
l
Relation
al
mental verbal Behavio
ral
existenti
al
335 142 29 39 4 7
60.0 26.3 5.4 5.6 1.4 1.3

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IGM in Scientific texts:
1. complexity in scientific language is achieved
mainly through specific terminology and
nominalization.
2. The most obvious practical reasons for analyzing
scientific texts is educational.
3. nominalization probably evolved first in
scientific and technical registers.
4. GM is very valued in scientific and academic
registers as a way of expressing objectification
and abstraction.
5. the difficulty lies more with the grammar than with
the vocabulary.

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Characteristics of scientific English
1. interlocking definitions
2. technical taxonomies
3. special expressions
4. lexical density,
5. syntactic ambiguity
6. grammatical metaphor (GM)
GM more significant because they state that
the items (4) and (5), are both by-products
of GM.
GM enables technicalizing and rationalizing

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1. Technicality by itself would be of little value
unless accompanied by a discourse of
reasoning.
2. Other functions such as condensing, compacting
and creating technical, expert and professional
terms are available to a quick conscious mind
and are applicable here.
3. elaborate use of technical terms by
reasoning, GMs as well as expanding the
topic.
4. The more GMs in the text, the fewer
processes, and consequently, the more
information load and lexical density.

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No. Metaphorical wording Congruent wording
Process
type
Frequency
in per text
1 could support germination
could support them to
germinate
material 1
2 have the voluntary ability are voluntarily able to relational 2
3 hyperventilating his lungs he hyperventilates his … behavioral 1
4 every new discovery
every new thing which is
discovered
material 2
5 128,000 hospitalizations
128,000 people were
hospitalized
material 1
6 the Mars of our dreams we have dreamed of Mars behavioral 2
7 the density of the air the air is dense and … relational 1
8 for pollination To be pollinated material 1
9 susceptibility to breast cancer that they are susceptible to ... relational 1

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1. Heavily nominalized language can sound
pretentious, significant and obscure
2. By nominalizing we are able to do things with
the text that we cannot do in unnominalized
text.
3. Allowing us to get away from the dynamic
and usually real word sequencing
4. Actions and logical relations are not in terms
of ourselves, but in terms of ideas, reasons,
causes, etc. 547 instances of IGM:
Materi
al
Relati
onal
mental verbal Behavi
oral
existen
tial
286 165 39 39 15 3
50.2 32.4 5.6 6.8 4.3 .7

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Discussion:
1. the higher frequency and dominant textual
forces of material and relational process
types.
2. metaphorical domain elaborates the
situation in a more fascinating, colorful and
desirable manner.
3. several important functions like condensing,
compacting, beautifying, and creating
scientific terms.

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In science:
1. creating technical and scientific terms or
new entities
2. systematizing previously stated
information
3. Establishing cause-and-effect relationships
between various phenomena.
4. For reasoning and expanding the smooth
flow of the text.
5. invite the reader to make sense of a world
structure which is tidily, carefully layered.
6. Having a high density of information.

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In politics:
1. GM’s role is fundamental in political
contexts
2. as a means of showing that you have
gained mastery over a discipline
3. As a technique for taking a chunk of
information & referring to it by a kind of
shorthand.
4. as a device to show that the writer has
power over the reader.
5. having the effect of making the second
expression sound more impersonal or
remote than the first.

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Conclusion
1. Investigating IGM in Science and politics
based on SFL.
2. carrying out an analysis on 10 political and
10 scientific texts to pinpoint their
similarities and dissimilarities based on
nominalization and process types.
3. Domination of IGM in both genres.
4. material process in political discourse is
more than scientific one (286 material
processes for science and 335 for politics)

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Conclusion
5. and it is probably because of the fact that
political texts deal with provoking,
persuading and convincing people toward a
particular party or group and require more
action words but scientific texts request more
abstract words.
6. employing the theoretical model of Halliday
& Matthiessen (1999) for analysis.
7. the greater the number of included
nominalizations, the greater the volume of
the information expressed by the sentence.

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Conclusion
a. actors are no longer readily identifiable,
b. they play a minor role,
c. they are irrelevant for the case at hand,
d. the writer is unable or unwilling to
identify them or,
e. the end result of an action is more
prominent than the action itself.
f. a core characteristic of nominalization is
that it turns actions into things, thus
Nominalizations give existence to things; in

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Implications
1. Smoothing the path for academic writing
2. GM is a feature of written language and it
makes the writing more expressive, vivid and
attractive.
3. without IGM, student's writing sounds
artificial, simple and non-academic.
4. enhancing awareness of students’
academic writing and reading.
5. texts with a high degree of GM tend to be
considered prestigious , academic and formal
in English contexts.

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Implications
6. learning and knowing about IGM shed
light on the fluent and smooth process of
translation to some extent.
7. IGM helps students to reduce the number
of clauses in their writing and pack more
information into each nominal group.
8. metaphorical domain explains the
situation
in a more vivid and excellent way and
beautify the texts.

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Suggestions for Further Research
1. inquiry of the other types of GM in
scientific and political texts.
2. There is also a need to analyze texts from
other perspectives to focus on another
type of GM, i.e. interpersonal, or other
metafunctions.
3. comparison and contrast of IGMs or other
types in two different languages, for
instance, Azeri vs. English or Persian vs.
English and the like can be accomplished.

A Comparative Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Political and Scientific Texts

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A Comparative Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Political and Scientific Texts