Grammatical Metaphor: A New Criterion for Distinguishing the Language of Science and Literature

One of the common concepts in systemic functional grammar of Michael Halliday is grammatical metaphor, generally introduced as a kind of metaphor. Halliday introduced and distinguished three grammatical metaphors: ideational, interpersonal and textual. This article reviewed the degree and method of applying different kinds of grammatical metaphors in scientific and literary texts. To do so, authors selected and analyzed one scientific work titled “an Introduction to Sociology of Language” by Yahya Modarresi and one literary text named “Tangsir” by Sadeq Chubak as their samples. Their findings showed that the degree of using different kinds of grammatical metaphors is not equal in scientific and literary texts. It seems that authors of scientific texts used grammatical metaphors to enrich contents, information summarization, making texts more technical for target audiences, making contents clearer and other reasons. The author of literary text used grammatical metaphors as few as possible. Abovementioned reasons do not apply in literary texts and this justifies its less usage. Therefore, the article attempts to introduce grammatical metaphor as a new criterion for distinguishing scientific and literary texts by providing enough proofs from these two texts.