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Grammatical metaphor – packaging of information at the clause level

Grammatical Metaphor: Moving Towards Abstraction

A literature review, as an academic written genre, is a survey of scholarly works relevant to a particular issue, theory, or research area the writer is interested in exploring and gives a description, summary or critical remarks. As a genre with an academic and specialised nature, with the subject matter moving away from sequences of experience and events towards more abstract knowledge and ideas, the written language should be technical, scientific and sophisticated, not only in terms of style, structure and format, but also the provision of “resources for the accumulation, compacting, foregrounding and background of information and evidence so that the argument can move forward” (Christie & Derewianka, 2008, p.25). Such a formulation for packaging information is called “grammatical metaphor”, as proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999).

Recent studies pointed out the problems students encountered writing academic genres, with comments on their wording (conciseness), informality (register) (Schleppegrell, 2004), interference by second language and inappropriateness use of lexicogrammatical resources to construe meanings (Chen & Foley, 2004). Students are often required to rephrase or use a more appropriate style in such written works. In view of this, control and management of the use of grammatical metaphor in academic text is essential in constructing a concise and formal written work. A proficient writer would deploy grammatical metaphor resources to present his/her idea. Being incapable of rank shifting, a novice writer, instead, would choose a more congruent way of relating events with causal links and narrate in a more “spoken style” which is less valued than the incongruent, “sounding written” style (Schleppegrell, 2004, p. 178).

Next section will include a detailed explanation on the formation of grammatical metaphor, as well as exemplification of the use of the incongruent writing style with grammatical metaphor.

Grammatical Metaphor: Un/packing of Information
Grammatical Metaphor and Nominalisation
Metaphorical alternatives
Reference