Transforming the Processes of Ideational Meaning through Grammatical Metaphor

Abstract

Grammatical Metaphor has become an interesting linguistic issue nowadays especially Ideational Grammatical Metaphor because of its usefulness and effectiveness in the packaging information. Ideational Grammatical Metaphor realized by transitivity covers the use of process and nominalization. Nominalization, as its most important device for making Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, usually condenses information by turning processes of clauses into nominal entities. This paper aims at exploring how that transferring occurs between the processes. To achieve this, we shall first offer a sketch of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor. Then we will explain how the transference of each process in the congruent expression to metaphorical expression. The analysis of characteristics of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor is conducted on over 100 samples collected from discourses and based on the light of Systemic Functional Grammar advanced by Halliday (1985) as a framework. The results show that Ideational Grammatical Metaphor is a transitivity system in which material process is mostly applied than mental, behavioral, existential, relational, and verbal processes. Nominalization is selected as the most used property of this language phenomenon. Such transference leads to clause reduction; namely long clausal construction becomes more concise. The findings conclude with discussions and pedagogical implications for teaching and learning English in writing.