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

Abstract

Language, science and politics go together and learning these genres is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and transmitting scientific and political knowledge. Grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal.This paper focuses on the first type i.e. Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM), which includes process types and nominalization. The main objective of the current work is to analyze a corpus comprising 10 scientific and 10 political texts. The IGM framework was used to carry out an analysis on these texts to pinpoint their similarities and dissimilarities. The analysis indicates that IGM has dominated political and scientific texts and surprisingly is used exactly with the same frequency in both genres and the prevailing process types in both are material and relational types. Consequently, the tone of the writing is more abstract, pretentious and formal. In science, instances of IGM enable technicalizing and rationalizing; and in politics they deal with dominance, provocation and persuasion toward an intended objective. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic writing and reading as well as translators and teachers involved in writing and reading pedagogy.