The Types of Grammatical Metaphors Used In Political and Scientific Genres

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. 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. According to Systemic Functional Grammar, grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: the ideational and the interpersonal. This study focuses on the first type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. the ideational one, which includes process types and nominalization. The main objective of the current work was to analyze, compare and contrast a corpus comprising 3000 scientific words and 3000 political words to pinpoint their similarities and dissimilarities in terms of IGMs and process types. The analysis indicates that IGM dominates the political texts in comparison with scientific texts and the prevailing process type in both genres is material type. 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.