Estudio contrastivo de ensayos académicos de antropología de la década de 1880 y la década de 1990. El rol de la metáfora gramatical

Abstract

This article explores the construction of representations of reality through the use of grammatical resources, in particular that of the grammatical metaphor in academic anthropology essays of the 1880s and the 1990s. The analysis is carried out from the theoretical perspectivemethodological systemic functional linguistics (SFL), taking into account the function of grammatical metaphor in conjunction with the notions of ‘semantic density’ or ‘mass’ and‘semantic gravity’ or ‘presence’ (Martin, 2017). The analysis reveals that the authors construct a specialized language in the discipline. In their explanations, they use language resources to build abstraction and generalization in which they tend to articulate ideational and interpersonal meanings, which generates a ‘semantic density’ and ‘semantic gravity’ that combine and create tensions between discourses more or less dependent on the context. Likewise, the grammatical metaphor plays a central role in textual aspects linked to the cohesion of academic texts, since it allows the packaging of entire previous clauses of the text in a nominal group and, on occasions, these packaging contain controversial points of view. This research aims to contribute to the advancement of knowledge of academic discourse and to the study of its evolution at the disciplinary level. The analysis of the functions of the grammatical metaphor in academic texts contributes to the design of teaching proposals that focus on the understanding and use of useful lexical-grammatical resources for the mastery of academic reading and writing.