A Comparative Study of Grammatical Metaphor in Persian Research Articles Written over the Past Three Decades

Adopting the Systemic-Functional Theory (Halliday, 1985) as its theoretical framework, the present corpus-based study explored the application of different types of ideational grammatical metaphors in Persian academic articles. For this purpose, 105 Persian research articles written over the three decades of 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in the fields of physics, chemistry, linguistics, political science, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and medicine were selected as examples of scientific discourse and the grammatical metaphors with the highest and lowest frequencies were determined. The disciplines exhibiting the highest frequencies of grammatical metaphors were identified as in the following descending order: civil engineering > medicine > physics > political science > mechanical engineering > linguistics. Based on the results obtained, deverbal nominalization recorded the highest frequency across the disciplines reviewed. In addition, no significant increase was observed in the use of grammatical metaphors among the research articles written, by Iranian writers over the past three decades. The findings also indicated that writing academic articles, in Persian, by Iranian researchers follows a too slow trend so that special plans and measures need to be adopted for its enhancement. Another aspect of the study involved the level of discourse complexity. For this purpose, the present author introduced the three indices of ‘the level of grammatical metaphor application in a specific discourse’, ‘awareness of the metaphorical processes in language’, and ‘their usage in scientific discourse’. Analysis of the corpus based on these indices rejected Holtz’s (2009) hypothesis stating that empirical sciences, compared to humanities, are expressed in a more complex language. Rather, discourse complexity estimates must be based on all the three indices introduced.