Halliday's IGM in Scientific texts

What is it about?

The principal objective of the present study is to enquire into IGM and their respective frequencies and also to identify and analyze the related process types in the corpus comprising 10 scientific texts, approximately 6100 words. These texts were analyzed in order to see how many instances of IGM are used in them and what the respective frequencies are. Furthermore, the data has been investigated to find out the role and function of IGM in terms of process types.

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Why is it important?

Scientific Texts are generally concentrated on highly technical terms, and they are troublesome to understand due to their complexity in forms and meanings. Grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal. This paper focuses on the first type i.e. Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, which includes process types and nominalization. This paper adopts Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar to pinpoint and analyze nominalization and the role played by it. With a corpus of 10 authentic scientific texts drawn from very influential magazines, the analysis is conducted based on nominalization, its frequency and process types. The analysis displays that Ideational Grammatical Metaphor has permeated scientific texts and the prevailing process types are material and relational types. Consequently, the tone of the writing is more abstract, technical and formal. Instances of IGM In scientific writing enable technicality and rationality. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for academic and scientific writing and reading as well as translators, students and instructors involved in writing and reading pedagogy.

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