contrastive analysis of Linguistic journals: A view From SFL

This paper reports on findings of a contrastive study between the English native speakers rhetoric vs. non-native Iranian writers. The study concentrated on the analysis of grammatical metaphor (GM) in concluding sections of linguistic articles. GM is defined as one of the distinctive features of academic writing in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The frequency of its occurrence and its realisation at semantic units of sequences, figures and elements are one of the criteria for the advanced academic writing. However, in this study, the concentration was only on the quantitative analysis of GM deployment between the native and non-native EFL writers. A corpus of fifty linguistic articles was randomly selected: twenty-five articles by the English and twenty-five by Iranian academic writers. The results of the analysis showed that the frequency of types and sub-types of GM deployed by the native English were higher than Iranian academic writers. It was also discovered there is a significant difference between the deployment of sub-types of experiential GM by the native and Iranian writers.