Grammatical metaphor across disciplines: variation, frequency, and dispersion

Grammatical metaphor (GM) has been shown to perform a central function in academic prose, enabling writers to reorganise grammatically intricate texts into lexically dense expression. It follows, therefore, that some facility with grammatical metaphor is an important facet of academic literacy. However, due to its contextual nature, the study of GM has almost entirely been conducted at small scale, precluding a broad understanding of how it is employed in published writing and the extent to which its use varies across disciplines. The current study begins to address these issues with an analysis of GM use in a 200,000-word corpus drawn from samples of 200 research articles across four disciplinary groupings. The 3,480 GMs identified in the analysis were ranked by frequency and dispersion and compared across the four disciplinary groupings. Some variation was detected between disciplines, both in frequency and in the most commonly used forms of GM, but these differences were small, suggesting that a generalised approach to the instruction of GM may be appropriate. The findings from this study can inform both future research into GM use and more accessible and strategic instruction of GM in ESP and EAP classes.