A corpus-based comparative study of ideational grammatical metaphor in marine engineering and maritime legal regulation English

Abstract

Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. This paper used Halliday’s metafunctional framework in marine engineering and maritime legal regulation English discourses under Prichard’s category (2003) of English for occupational purposes and English for academic purposes respectively. The analysis of data was conducted through a description of English occupational and academic texts, based on grammatical metaphor. The researcher conducted some statistical analysis, including frequency and percentage of ideational grammatical metaphor and its different processes of transitivity in both genres. Finally, two genres of English texts were compared statistically to show in what aspect they are significantly different or similar. The results obtained indicate that the two genres bear more similarities than differences in terms of using the nominalization of ideational grammatical metaphor. In other words, while indicating genre differences, the study proves their functional similarities in using the material process types more than other process types to convey meaning, however marine engineering English applies a little less frequency of material and relational process. Some behavior process types were found in marine engineering English texts but no behavior processes were found in marine legal English. Maritime legal English applies small amount of existential process and mental process while in marine engineering English these two types of process were not found. Both genres apply ideational metaphor to condense the information and increase the complexity of sentence structure.