Comparative Study of Iranian Medical Journals in English and Those of Two English-speaking Countries

One major feature of English scientific language is grammatical metaphor (GM) which helps promote the conciseness and preciseness of the texts. The present study aimed to investigate if Iranian writers of medical research articles (RAs) have employed the types of ideational GM appropriately and adequately. Therefore, the ideational GM types used in three information units (including Stating a specific outcome, Interpreting the outcome, and Contrasting present and previous outcome) of the Discussion Sections of two groups of randomly selected Iranian as well as British and American RAs (32 articles each), published between January 2008 to February 2009 in the journals of ISI web of science, have been compared/contrasted. The differences between the two groups’ uses of all the GMs were calculated using Independent t-tests. The results showed that although Iranian articles were shown to employ significantly (p