A synthesis of research on grammatical metaphor: meta-data and content analysis

Abstract

Adopting the methodology of research synthesis, the present study takes stock of primary research studies on grammatical metaphor (GM) within systemic-functional linguistics and maps the research landscape since Halliday proposed this concept in 1985. Based on the data from 118 primary studies, we first report on the publication and methodological features of these studies. We then conduct content analysis, which is based on five domains of interest, viz. language description, register variation, education, language comparison, and translation. Major findings are: (i) The type of GM in these studies is dominated by ideational GM; less attention has been given to interpersonal GM; (ii) Textual GM has emerged as a heated issue recently. (iii) While education represents the most studied field, there remains considerable research space in other domains. Finally, some theoretical issues and implications for future directions are highlighted.

Keywords:

• Research synthesis
• grammatical metaphor
• systemic functional linguistics
• domain development
• meta-data
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Christian Matthiessen for his enormous support and invaluable comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank those anonymous reviewers for their useful and insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.