Journal of Applied Linguistics (May 2012)
Types of Grammatical Metaphors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Abstract
Grammatical Metaphor (GM) is one of the fresh language phenomena introduced by Halliday (1985) in the framework of functional grammar. Thompson (2004) states that the salient source of GM would be ‘Nominalization’ where a noun form attempts to represent a verb form or in other words, a verb form with its different process is represented in a noun form. He continues that any wording is ought to be either metaphorical or congruent wording. In this study the story of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was explored in search of GMs deployed throughout the first two chapters. This study tended to identify the instances of nominalization types of GM in the first two chapters of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and offer the congruent wording. As the next step, the congruent wordings were compared with metaphorical wording in order to find out the lexical density of each wording. The lexical density was obtained by Concordance software. The result of study illustrated , in a very crystal-clear way, the advantage of GM in adult writing which is stated to be one of the noticeable points regarding GM by Halliday (1985).The result obtained statistically revealed that the deployment of GM increases the lexical density, which again was claimed by Halliday (2004) as one of the other salient points about GM. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic writing and reading as well as for teachers involved in writing and reading pedagogy.
