A grammatical metaphor word list

Research has identified a particularly useful lexicogrammatical resource that language learners need in order to develop academic literacy, that of grammatical metaphor (GM). GM enables the wordy expression characteristic of informal, spoken discourses to be reorganized into the cohesive and abstracted expression valued in academic texts. Although it is a key element of written academic discourse, resources for teaching GM are limited, and research into learners' development of GM has been constrained by the manually intensive nature of its analysis. In response to these constraints, this article presents a Grammatical Metaphor Word List (GML), a systematically compiled list of 4574 GMs identified in two academic writing corpora: a collection of student essays, and a specialized corpus derived from 200 published research articles. The paper first describes how the GML was compiled before comparing the use of GM in these specialized learner and expert populations. It concludes with a discussion of some potential applications of the GML in both research and instruction. Given the constraints on large-scale investigations into GM, it is our hope that the GML will prove valuable as a resource to inform L2 instruction and as a tool to expedite research into language learners' GM development.