AN INVESTIGATION OF GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR IN STUDENTS' WRITING AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE TEXTS' WRITTEN CHARACTERISTICS

• Main Author: Yuliana, Dian (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: 2011-11-04.
• Subjects: Thesis; NonPeerReviewed
• Online Access: Link Metadata
• Notes: http://repository.upi.edu/9953/1/t_bing_0808632_table_of_content.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/2/t_bing_0808632_chapter_i.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/3/t_bing_0808632_chapter_2.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/4/t_bing_0808632_chapter_3.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/5/t_bing_0808632_chapter_4.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/6/t_bing_0808632_chapter_5.pdf; http://repository.upi.edu/9953/7/t_bing_0808632_bibliography.pdf
• Keywords: L Education (General); PE English

This thesis reports the study on the use of grammatical metaphor in research articles and how the use of the metaphor contributes to the written language characteristics of the texts. The study was motivated by the distinction of written language from its spoken version (Halliday, 1985) as apparent in academic writing (e.g. Schleppegrell, 2005). Grammatical Metaphor, a linguistic phenomenon involving incongruent realization of grammatical structure (Halliday, 1985), provides rich resources for creating written language characteristics. There has been a growing interest in studies investigating the contribution of grammatical metaphor to the written characteristics of texts in academic writing (e.g. Christie and Derewianka, 2008; Ravelli, 2005; Schleppegrell, 2005; Thompson, 2010). Regardless its importance however, there has not been much research investigating grammatical metaphor in Indonesian EFL setting.The data for the study were nine research articles of three postgraduate students. Drawing on the notions of grammatical ideational metaphor developed by Halliday (1998), interpersonal metaphor by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), and textual metaphor by Martin (1992), this study found that: 1) all types of grammatical metaphor are present in the research articles with variation in quantity and degree of success; 2) nominalization is the dominant type of grammatical metaphor found in the research articles; 3) grammatical metaphor contributes to the texts' written characteristics through: a) lexical density; b) abstraction; c) technicality; d) implicit logical connection and e) impersonal construction. It was also found that the participants' less successful deployment of one type of grammatical metaphor, textual metaphor, reduces another text's written characteristics regarding clear text structuring.Based on these findings, it is expected that the concern of grammatical metaphor receive more emphasis in the curriculum of English learning especially in that of higher education. Since exposure to grammatical metaphor will help students to understand advanced literacy which is heavily constructed with rich grammatical metaphor, the incorporation of grammatical metaphor into the curriculum will also help them to produce sophisticated piece of writing highly valued in academic writing.