Ideational grammatical metaphor: A key resource for advanced and academic literacy

Abstract

Ideational grammatical metaphor (Halliday, 1994/1985, 1998) is a linguistic resource of the academic register, which implies ‘objectifying’ the experiential meanings and become less contestable logical meanings. The domain of this resource is important to achieve a state of advanced and academic literacy in different disciplines, so this research aims to identify and characterize ten types of ideational grammatical metaphor (experiential and logical) in Chilean students writing in the areas of Biology and History and in three stages of formation, namely, 9th and 11th high school grades and 3rd year of university education. The findings show that students intuitively use different types of metaphors from 9th grade, however, its use is not always consistent or appropriate. In history, as well as in Biology, a constant vacillation between congruent and metaphorical forms can be seen and, at the university level, a type of characteristic metaphor of the historical discourse is identified.