A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Marine Engineering and Maritime Legal Regulation English

Xuehua Wu ,Cai Xue-Ying

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.5p.76

Abstract

Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. This paper used Halliday’s metafunctional framework in marine engineering and maritime legal regulation English discourses under Prichard’s category (2003) of English for occupational purposes and English for academic purposes respectively. The analysis of data was conducted through a description of English occupational and academic texts, based on grammatical metaphor. The researcher conducted some statistical analysis, including frequency and percentage of ideational grammatical metaphor and its different processes of transitivity in both genres. Finally, two genres of English texts were compared statistically to show in what aspect they are significantly different or similar. The results obtained indicate that the two genres bear more similarities than differences in terms of using the nominalization of ideational grammatical metaphor. In other words, while indicating genre differences, the study proves their functional similarities in using the material process types more than other process types to convey meaning, however marine engineering English applies a little less frequency of material and relational process. Some behavior process types were found in marine engineering English texts but no behavior processes were found in marine legal English. Maritime legal English applies small amount of existential process and mental process while in marine engineering English these two types of process were not found. Both genres apply ideational metaphor to condense the information and increase the complexity of sentence structure.

Highlights

In many instances, metaphorical expression has become the norm and the characteristics of written English
Marine engineering English and maritime legal regulation English texts have the features of long and complicated sentence structure, condensed information, subject terms or technique words, and specific knowledge
Twelve texts of marine engineering English and eleven maritime law texts are analyzed on the basis of definitions of ideational grammatical metaphor presented by Halliday (2004) to find out the instances of ideational grammatical metaphors used in both genres and the percentages and frequencies of process types of ideational grammatical metaphors in each genre

Summary

Introduction

Metaphorical expression has become the norm and the characteristics of written English. Marine engineering English and maritime legal regulation English texts (the two genres contained in our compulsory course book) have the features of long and complicated sentence structure, condensed information, subject terms or technique words, and specific knowledge (as shown in the following example). These bring about the difficulties for readers to understand. The bedplate, which in most cases is of the welded design, is bolted to the seating which forms a part of the double bottom of the ship. It is secured in the transverse direction by means of bolts known as side-chock bolts and in longitudinal direction by means of end-chock bolts (China Maritime Organization, 2012: 3)

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Conclusion