Grammatical metaphor in Social Sciences textbooks in Spanish

Abstract

This paper addresses the study of grammatical metaphor in Spanish, specifically in Social Science textbooks in use in Colombian secondary schools. Our main interest is to analyze, from a Systemic Functional Grammar perspective (Halliday, 1994, 2004b), the particular characteristics of ideational grammatical metaphors in Spanish and their implications for citizenship education and for learning processes. The corpus is made up of chapters about the Industrial Revolution from three eighth-grade texts. Our analysis has identified the presence of grammatical metaphors in Hallidayan terms: nominalizations of processes and qualities and the use of causal verbs in place of conjunctions. We have also identified other types of metaphor: nonergative clauses, historical present tense, and inanimate participants. The paper also stresses the importance of unpacking metaphors during the process of analysis and also during teaching and learning processes, since unpacking sheds light on information hidden in the metaphor.