Document Type : Research
Authors
Abstract
Grammatical Metaphor in Medical Research Articles: A Comparative Study of Iranian Medical Journals in English and Those of Two English-speaking Countries Nasrin Sayfouri[1] Abbas Ali Rezaee[2] Agha Fatemeh Hosseini[3] Received: 2012/02/22 Accepted: 2013/01/30 Abstract 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 < 0.05) fewer proportions of the two types of ideational GM in general as well as fewer individual uses of the adjective-making GMs compared to British and American ones, the two groups employed similar proportions of nominalization. To help medical writers develop more efficient use of different types of GMs, particularly adjective-making ones, materials writers or medical educators should provide consciousness-raising trainings for the interested scholars. The findings can be employed in article evaluation as well. Keywords: systemic functional linguistics, ideational metafunction, logical metafunction, experiential metafunction, grammatical metaphor, Iranian medical research articles in English.
[1] Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran (corresponding author); sayfouri.n@iums.ac.ir [2]Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran; aarezaee@ut.ac.ir [3]Instructor, Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran; hosseini.f@iums.ac.ir
Keywords
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