Publications

Publication details [#10231]

Stalhammar, Mall. 2007. Translation of grammatical metaphor. Revista Antares 47 : 511–523. 13 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Abstract

Expressions of the type 'The results show that...', although experienced by the reader as a personification of the inanimate subject 'results', are classified by M. A. K. Halliday and J. R. Martin (1993) as grammatical metaphors, as one grammatical class is substituted by another; ie, the verb is associated with the unmentioned subject of a process that is packaged into the nominalization that functions as grammatical subject. The use and translation of grammatical metaphors is investigated in a comparison of parallel English, French, German, and Swedish texts of the Treaty on European Union; although complete agreement across all four texts is found for only two grammatical metaphors, the English and French versions largely agree, whereas the German version replaces nearly all grammatical metaphors with passive constructions or a collocation of support verb and predicate. The Swedish version is roughly evenly divided between the English and German patterns. (J. Hitchcock) (LLBA, (c) CSA [2007]. All rights reserved.)