Ideational Grammatical Metaphors. Applications in Selected Registers

This term paper deals with the topic of grammatical metaphors, with a special focus on grammatical metaphors of the ideational kind and their use in certain registers.

To define grammatical metaphor, as well as explain and analyze their use, I will take a closer look at the works of several researchers and linguists, with M.A.K. Halliday being the most important one of these. Given it was Halliday who first coined the term “grammatical metaphor” and tried to give a detailed explanation of the concept, his works will be the most vital to this paper and stand at its center.

Further, it is impossible to take a detailed look on grammatical metaphor without having at least a basic understanding on Halliday’s concept of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Therefore, one chapter of this paper will take a closer look at SFL and basically explain this concept.

The questions this paper is supposed to answer are the following: what are ideational grammatical metaphors, in which registers are they used most frequently, and what is the purpose or function of such metaphors in these registers?