Event by Thing: SFL-based Grammatical Metaphors in the English Language Textbook for High School Students in Indonesia

Abstract

The study is to investigate grammatical metaphors on the basis of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Data were collected from one English language textbook used by students in Grade 12 of Senior High Schools in Indonesia. The textbook passages were selected according to the presented school subjects. Afterward, they were retyped and edited by breaking down the clauses into data, and finally were printed out. Based on SFL, analysis was conducted in several steps: identifying any grammatical metaphor in the data, rewording or unpacking the data into a congruent form, and next comparing the two forms and classifying them into any classes of grammatical metaphor based on their served functions. The results show that eight main grammatical metaphors used in the textbook passages. They are the realization of Event = Thing (36.5%), that of Manner = Epithet (20.4%), Event = Epithet (17.2%), Epithet = Thing (13.9%), Head = Modifier (6.4%), Conjunctive = Event (3.2%), Conjunctive = Thing (1%), and Conjunctive = Epithet (1%). The analysis concludes that the key reason of the grammatical metaphor applications found in the English textbook are mainly to dense the presented information so as High Schools’ students as the main readers of the book are facilitated to process the information. Moreover, the English textbook is considered to promote any scientific writing models to Grade 12 students who are preparing to a higher education level in which scientific writing is prominently demanded.