Hallidayan Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Specialized Texts

Languages have their most natural ways of encoding the meanings which they express. This is called congruent way, and the non-congruent ways of encoding language are referred to as grammatical metaphor (GM). According to Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), GM is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal. This book focuses on the first type of GM, i.e. the ideational one, which includes process types and nominalization. Nominalization is acknowledged to be a powerful linguistic resource for realizing GM. The main objective of the current work is to analyze, compare and contrast a corpus comprising 10 scientific and 10 political texts to pinpoint their similarities and dissimilarities in terms of Nominalization and process types. In science, instances of IGM enable technicalizing and rationalizing the writing, and in politics, they deal with dominance, provocation and persuasion toward an intended and specific objective. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic writing and reading as well as for translators and teachers involved in writing and reading pedagogy.