A Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Health Texts of English Newspapers

Systemic functional grammar constructs a grammar for the purpose of text analysis to investigate how grammar is used as a means of making meaning. Grammatical metaphor is one of the language phenomena introduced by Halliday (2004) in the framework of functional grammar. The present work focuses on the application of Halliday’s metafunctional framework in health texts of English newspapers. The analysis of data was conducted through a description of English newspaper texts, based on ideational grammatical metaphor. To this end, the researcher conducted some statistics to this strand of meaning, including frequency and percentage of nominalization type of ideational grammatical metaphor in health texts. The obtained results indicate that health texts of English newspapers are using the nominalization of ideational grammatical metaphor and also transitivity analysis in health texts shows how we can express the same meaning in different ways.