Skolspråk i utveckling. En- och flerspråkiga elevers bruk av grammatiska metaforer i senare skolår.

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this thesis is to compare the use of grammatical metaphor in 365 texts written by Swedish mono- and multilingual students in year 9 and 11, both regarding occurrence of GM and the use of its functions. The theoretical framework for the thesis is Systemic-functional linguistics, and second language research on age and development of educational language. The results show that older students make more use of grammatical metaphors than younger students, and that the monolingual students use more grammatical metaphors than the multilingual students. Among the multilingual students, the students with an early and a late age of onset use grammatical metaphors more than multilingual students with an age of onset in between the two others. On the other hand, L2 deviations increase with a higher age of onset. Thus, grammatical metaphor might represent a different kind of language competence, than do the deviations, that depend on familiarity with texts and education. The results are interpreted in relation to the Interdependence Hypothesis, formulated by Cummins (1979). Apart from the mere occurrence of grammatical metaphor, the functions of grammatical metaphor, e.g. expansion of the nominal phrase in the case of nominalizations, was found to be more frequently used in texts dense with grammatical metaphor, contributing to the construction of specialized, educational knowledge. The analysis comprises a methodological discussion of the demarcation of the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor. Different types of grammatical metaphor are distinguished and discussed regarding their functions for abstraction, concretizations and different “world views”.