Characterization of two academic genres in the light of grammatical metaphor: A systemic-functional study

Abstract

Using the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics, an analysis of grammatical metaphor (a concept coined within this theory) was carried out in two genres that belong to the language of humanities. The main purpose was to compare and contrast the use of this lexico-grammatical resource in Literature essays and book reviews. A corpus of 32 texts written by college students (12 essays and 20 book reviews) from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) was utilized. In addition, five texts published in a journal of Literature were analyzed in order to compare them to the college texts. The results showed that there are significant differences in the use of grammatical metaphor in both genres.