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This partly longitudinal study applies the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics to second language writing to investigate the use of grammatical metaphor (GM; non-congruent realizations of meaning, e.g. nominalizations) in 365 texts written by Swedish mono- and multilingual students in grades 9 and 11. According to the analysis, older students and monolingual students make greater use of GM than younger students and multilingual students. Multilingual students with early and late ages of onset use GM more than multilingual students with onset ages between these two extremes. A relation was found between the occurrence of GM and the use of the potential functions of GM, e.g. expansion of the nominal phrase, which was used more frequently in texts with a higher GM density, contributing to the construction of specialized, educational knowledge. The occurrence of GM was compared to the occurrence of L2 deviations in a subcorpus. These results are interpreted in relation to the Interdependence Hypothesis formulated by Cummins (1979).
