Apresentação realizada no Simposia : Establishing an International Knowledge Netwok (QUB, USP, UFSC, PUC-Rio) - Maio, 2011.

1. Simposia : Establishing an international knowledge netwok
QUB, USP, UFSC, PUC-Rio
May 3, 2011
Grammatical metaphor, academic
writing and corpus analysis
Lúcia Pacheco de Oliveira
Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro

2. Presentation:
Research project
Objetives of the research
Grammatical metaphor
Data analysis
Implications and problems
Future research

3. Research project: Introduction:
‘Writing and social inclusion: corpus analysis and
grammatical metaphor in secondary education
(FAPERJ – 2009-2011)
• Focus
Examine the written production of
adolescents from different socio-cultural
contexts
Relate literacy and social inclusion issues in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Collect a learner corpus and apply
computational tools in the analysis

4. Motivation:
•Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) Group:
Systemic-Functional Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics
and Discourse Analysis (PUC-Rio, 2006 - 2011);
•Reports from research group members who work as
teachers in elementary and secondary schools;
•Previous studies on writing, based on the systemic-
functional perspective, with emphasis on grammatical
metaphor.

5. Background studies:
Research on academic texts
Research articles:
Linguistics and Nutrition; English and Portuguese
(Oliveira, 2006; Valério, Brito & Oliveira, 2007)
Theses and Dissertations:
Linguistics – Introductions and Conclusions ; Portuguese.
(Valério & Oliveira, 2007);
Theses and Dissertations:
Linguistics and Literature; Portuguese.
(Oliveira, 2010);
Secondary school essays :
Argumentative texts ; Portuguese
( Castro, 2009; Oliveira,Schlee & Nóbrega, 2009; Ramos, 2010)

6. Secondary School Writing:
Project contextualization
Written Brazilian Portuguese sometimes viewed as a foreign language by
secondary public school students.
Problems faced by secondary students when writing texts in their first
language might be related to the lack of grammatical metaphor mastery .
Difficulties in producing and understanding texts in other school subjects
might also be connected to the lack of grammatical metaphor awareness
and might , consequently, impair success in the construction of knowledge
in the school environment.
Grammatical metaphor as a fundamental linguistic resource for the
elaboration of texts produced in academic and school contexts , which
implies, among other aspects, the transformation of more concrete ideas
into more abstract ones, through the use of nominalizations in place of
verbal processes.
(Martin, 1993; Christie, 2006; Oliveira, 2006,
Halliday, 1994; Heyvaert, 2003)

7. School Contexts in Rio de Janeiro:
Federal, State and Private
North Zone: Federal
and State Schools
South Zone: Private
school
West Zone: State Schools
Central Zone:
Private School
Periphery Zone :
Private School

8. Public and Private Secondary Schools
651 texts
Periphery
79 texts
North
108 texts
South
173 texts
Região metropolitana
West
202 texts Center
89 texts

9. Objectives of the present research|:
Study the use of grammatical metaphor in public school
secondary student writing:
Identification and quantification of the use of grammatical
metaphors in argumentative student texts
Observation of students’ socio-educational condition
variables
Comparison of metaphorical language use in secondary
school writing and university entrance exams

10. Grammatical Metaphor
“ The metaphor brings about a reconstrual of
experience, in which reality comes to consist of
things rather than doing and happening”.
“ It would be wrong, however, to equate grammatical
metaphor with nominalization. Nominalization is
predominant, in the sense that most metaphoric shift
is shift into nominal group. But not all of it”.
(Halliday, 2009: 125, 127)

11. Grammatical Metaphor
The process of metaphor is one of reconstruing the patterns
of realization in a language– particularly at the interface
between the grammar and the semantics. A meaning that was
originally construed by one kind of wording comes instead
to be construed by another.’
‘.... grammatical abstracness is the key for entering into
literacy, and to primary educational knowledge, so
grammatical metaphor is the key for entering into the next
level, that of secondary education, and of knowledge that is
discipline-based and technical.’
(Halliday,2009:117, 125)

12. Grammatical Metaphor
All human adults and all human languages
possess this ability to shift from the clausal to the
nominal construal of experience, but this inherent
potential in the grammar....is most characteristic
of scientific discourse and the need to construct
technical taxonomies and sequential argument”
(Halliday, 2009: 116)

13. Nominalizations
They are the predominant form of grammatical metaphor
They consist in the use of a nominal form to express a process
meaning
They may have different functions:
Creation of technical language
Creation of non-negotiable ‘thingfied’ experience
Encapsulation of meaning
Development of argumentation

14. Questions
Do Brazilian secondary public school students use grammatical
metaphor in their texts?
Is students’ textual production in accordance with late
secondary school writing requirements?

15. Method
Participants:
12th grade Brazilian public school students from 14-18
years old (N=98)
Corpus:
Written argumentative texts collected in federal and state
schools
Topic adequate for:
Students’ age
Schools socio-educational context

16. Method
Data collection instruments:
Questionnaire on socio-educational conditions
Writing proposal with picture and newspaper headlines
as prompts
Samples:
250-word texts on quality of life in Rio de Janeiro
(N=92)
Questionnaires on reading and writing habits (N=98)

17. Questionnaire:
socio-educational condition variables
Students’ frequency of spontaneous vs. mandatory
reading and writing
Students’ reading habits
Students’ family reading habits

18. STUDENTS' AGE
19-24 > 25 years
years old old
11% 0%
14-18
years old
89%

19. STUDENTS' READING HABITS
Spontaneous
reading
9%
Obligatory
No reading reading
38% 53%

20. STUDENTS' SELF-EVALUATION ON
WRITING
Difficulty Facility to
to write write
37% 63%

21. WRITTEN GENRES PRACTICED BY STUDENTS
Poetry No
Varied writing
6%
10% 6%
Journal
5%
Orkut
37%
School
texts
36%

22. FAMILY READING HABITS
No
reading
6%
Frequent
reading
41%
Scarce
reading
53%

23. Text Analysis
Texts analyzed manually and with the help of computational
tools:
Concordancer: MonoConc Pro
Nominalizations from agnate verbs identified and counted :
Search based on productive noun suffixation in Portuguese
(Basilio, 2007)
Normalization of basic frequencies
Means calculated for each group

24. Proposal
Escreva um texto argumentativo, com cerca de 25 linhas, em que você
apresente o seu ponto de vista sobre a qualidade de vida na cidade do Rio
de Janeiro. A figura e as manchetes abaixo sugerem alguns aspectos que
podem ser abordados.
Rio: a cidade mais feliz do
mundo, segundo pesquisa
internacional.
Rio vai enfrentar enorme desafio
para receber olimpíadas 2016.
Vandalismo destrói história do rio
e custa caro aos cofres da cidade.
Operação choque de ordem atua
no centro do Rio.
Interchange. CUP, 2005

25. Secondary public school student
writing: General features
Oralized writing
Lack of punctuation
Phonetic spelling
Lengthy sentences
Difficulty to understand text instructions
Limited use of varied grammatical patterns

26. Results:
Schools - means of nominalizations
-cia -cias -ção -ções -dor -dores -ssão -ssões -mento -mentos
School 1 0,12 0,06 1,41 0,29 0,00 0,12 0,06 0,00 0,35 0,18
School 2 0,71 0,07 1,96 0,50 0,04 0,32 0,07 0,00 0,68 0,18
School 3
0,23 0,09 1,77 0,34 0,06 0,34 0,04 0,00 0,81 0,09
School 1 (State) : 17 texts / 2.776 words
Group frequencies normalized to 5000 words School 2 (Federal) : 28 texts / 6.045 words
School 3 (State) : 47 texts / 9.716 words

27. Sample:
Public Secondary School
Como será o Rio nas Olimpíadas 2.016
Todos nós sabemos que para receber as Olimpíadas 2.016 o Rio de Janeiro vai passar por um
processo longo e intenso de obras.
Essas obras tem a finalidade de limpar nossos rios, lagoas e praias para as provas que neles
serão realizadas; construir hotéis para receber e acomodar os turistas; melhorar o transporte
para que as pessoas possam chegar nos locais em um tempo adequado; reformar estádios para
receber os jogos e os torcedores com mais conforto; aumentar a segurança em nossa cidade
para que todos possam caminhar sem o medo de ser assaltado ou de ser surpreendido por uma
troca de tiros, e outras reformas mais.
Porém será que a limpeza dos rios, lagoas e praias, o aumento da segurança e outras coisas mais
não deveriam ser medidas tomadas a muito tempo, mesmo sem as Olimpíadas. Como será que
vai ficar o Rio de Janeiro depois que passar as Olimpíadas. As melhorias serão conservadas
pela população e pelo poder público, ou vai ser abandonada.
A idéia de trazer as Olimpíadas 2.016 para o Rio de Janeiro é muito animadora. Mas temos
que pensar nos pontos bons e tambem nos ruins.
(191 words)

28. Summary of findings
Secondary public school students use fewer
nominalizations than those entering the university
The most frequent suffix is ção (ções): similar tendency in
other genres (ex:research articles, theses and dissertations)
Written texts do not match the writing proposal: more
descriptive (more processes than nominalizations)
Students’ written production is in accordance with the
expected production of early to mid secondary school
Students’ self-evaluation of their mastery of writing
is based on ‘out of school’ texts

29. Discussion:
Brazilian secondary public school students’ written production is
misleveled:
At school they are expected to master different genres in
different subjects that require the use of metaphorical language
Students’ perception towards their mastery in writing versus
problems observed in the selected samples
The mismatch between secondary school literacy requirements
and students’ written production may lead into school failure

30. Implications
Make teachers aware of the need to teach the
grammatical metaphor
Make secondary students understand the function
of grammatical metaphor in writing
Make learners able to use it in their texts in
different disciplines
Make educators - in general - aware of the real
literacy situation which might be connected to
social exclusion

31. Problems:
Difficulties to identify and count nominalizations:
Consider correct or incorrect forms?
Ex: “condissões”; “atiramento”
Which forms are actually metaphorical?
Ex: “fazer saneamento básico”/ sanear
How to apply automatic processing and computational tools to
learners’ problematic texts?
Ex: Software Palavras and Unitex

32. Future developments:
Add the subcorpus of learner texts to the CORPOBRAS PUC-
Rio ;
Present results and publications in a site;
Develop the analysis:
to compare variation of the grammatical metaphor
according to types of schools, different grades, etc.
to study other lexico-grammatical transformations;
Hold an event and prepare reports to share results with schools
(teachers and students)
Write teaching materials on the use of the grammatical
metaphor

34. References
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