Traduzione, commento e analisi stilistica di ''Medical Care of Cancer Patients''

The lexical density and the syntactic ambiguity discussed under the last two headings can also be seen as by-products of a process I have already referred to as grammatical metaphor. This is like metaphor in the usual sense, but with a significant twist: in lexical metaphors words are substituted, whereas in grammatical metaphors grammatical classes and structures undergo the same substitutional process (Halliday 1993:79).
This should be taken as a working definition, since a more in-depth one will be provided in the next chapter. A straightforward example of grammatical metaphor would be the couplet she departed and her departure: here the words are the same, but their place in the grammar has changed. Scientific writing abounds with such phenomena, which nonetheless are not a recent trend: Greek scientists had already taken up and developed a resource in the grammar of Greek, that is the potential for deriving from the lexical stem of one word another word of a different class (Halliday 1993:12). By transforming adjectives and verbs into nouns they generated ordered sets of technical terms (i.e. abstract entities) which had begun to circulate as the names of processes or properties, for instance motion, weight, sum, revolution, distance (Halliday 1993:12).
In addition these scholars were responsible for the development of the modifying potential of the Greek nominal group, therefore making it possible to create specifications of bodies and of figures. These resources were imported by calquing into Latin and ever since contributed to the discourse of technology and science.
According to Halliday this phylogenetic pattern is reflected in each individual logogenesis. If we took a random example, such as ―two terms are helpful in describing the nature of engine failure‖ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_Engine_Failure, retrieved on 14th November 2009) and we decided to explain it to a child, we would be likely to reword it and the most likely element to be reworded would be turbine engine failure.