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

Abstract

Grammatical Metaphor constitutes a key building block of Systemic Linguistics and has a great contribution to the theory of metaphor. This paper addresses itself to the first type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. the ideational one. In ideational metaphors, lexico-grammatical features constitute alternative ways of constructing a picture of reality. The main objective of the current work is to analyze a corpus comprising three business and three political texts. . The texts were analyzed to see how many instances of ideational metaphor are used and what the respective frequencies are, as well as the role and function of ideational metaphor in business and political texts. The analysis brought out the finding that ideational metaphor has indeed pervaded political and business texts. Nominalization has been used in both of the genres, turning the process (verb) to a concept (noun). As a consequence, the tone of the writing sounds more abstract and more formal. In business, the instances of grammatical metaphor aren’t coloured and fuelled by relations of power and ideology. In politics, however, they evidence indicators of uneven power by discursive agents of dominance. Some implications accrue to these findings, as well as some qualitative conclusions, in reference to discourse and translation studies, or teachers involved in writing instruction, to name only a few.