Friday 21 January 2022

The Motive Behind The Primary Motif Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 267):
Thus in English the more structure that is to be imposed on experience the more pressure there is to construe it in the form of things. But things are merely the end-point of the metaphoric scale. Processes, though more constrained than things, still have more semantic potential than relators: they accommodate categories of time and phase, among others, and are construed in open lexical sets, whereas relators form closed systems. So there is also a pressure there too, to metaphorise conjunctions into verbs: then, so, because, before, therefore becoming follow, result, cause, anticipate, prove. (Circumstances are something of a special case because most of them already contain participants in minor, subsidiary processes — prepositional phrases in the grammar.) But it remains true that things are the most susceptible of being classified and organised into taxonomies; hence the primary motif of grammatical metaphor is that of construing a world in the form of things.