Instances do not usually repeat each other word for word; there is some variation … It is this variation that constructs the domain. With each instance of the field, the overall meaning potential is instantiated in slightly varying ways; this variation both confirms the earlier patterns and nudges them along some novel path.
The relationship which links the domain models with the general model is instantiation. Instantiation relates the system to the instance, at any given stratum. … A domain is located somewhere between the system and the instance. Hence it can be looked at from either end. Seen from the ‘system’ end, a domain is regular and repeated patterning in the way potential is deployed, over the course of time. Seen from the ‘instance’ end, it is generalisation across particular instances of text.
Domain models are variants of the general model. A particular domain model specifies which of the semantic systems in the overall model are activated in a particular contextual field: the ideational meanings that are “at risk”. Each field thus has its own semantic profile, which can be seen against the background of the overall semantic potential.
… the semantic correlate of a contextual field is a domain. When we model the ideational semantics of a particular field, we create a domain model.
If the field is defined in relatively broad terms, it may activate most of the general part of the ideation base; but a more restricted field may call on only one particular part of it. In such cases, it may be useful to reduce the whole ideation base to only those parts that are implicated for the particular field; that is, to set up a field-specific ideational semantics. (More generally, this might be a context-specific semantics, including interpersonal and textual as well as ideational meanings). However, the price of this would be to isolate such a field from others to which it is related.
Each field is projected onto one variety of the ideation base: that is, it can be thought of as activating some portion of the total semantic resources. This projection of field onto the ideation base involves both the particular domain and the general types under which this domain is classified. A given field is thus constituted as a principled selection of types from within the ideation base; this is so to speak its semantic image projected from context.
… a full account of field would include a typology of the possible first and second order values that occur in a culture. Such a typology would show how closely various fields are related — how they form families. So, given three different fields, 1, 2, and 3, the typology will show three different ways of deploying the ideation base.
… field can be characterised as the deployment and organisation of the ideation base. … there are two aspects to this category. In most contexts, there is both a first order field and a second order field — the first order field is the social activity being pursued (eg instructing somebody in how to prepare a dish …) and the second order field is the ‘subject matter’ the activity is concerned with (eg the ingredients and methods of cooking …). … And both these guide the way the ideation base is deployed.
… the covariation between context and language is not undifferentiated — it is differentiated according to the functional diversification of each of the two strata: the variables of context correlate respectively with the metafunctions of language, field with ideational, tenor with interpersonal, and mode with textual. These pairs are mutually predictive.
… the notion of functional dialect was worked out by the Prague School in the 1930s … and systemic register theory has its roots in Firth’s work on restricted languages. The concept of register is also recognised in computational linguistics under the heading of sublanguage, particularly in work on machine translation.
Together, field, tenor and mode define the ‘ecological matrix’ in which particular types of text are processed: there is a systematic relationship between such matrices (particular combinations of field, tenor and mode values) and particular types of text. We can see this clearly with actual instances of text — for example, an individual recipe or weather forecast; but these are instances of general classes, to be characterised in terms of the systemic potential that is instantiated in them. That is, there is a correlation not only between a contextual matrix and a given instance of a recipe but also between that matrix and the linguistic potential that is deployed in recipes in general. The latter correlation is known as a functional variety or register of the general systemic potential.
… both these contextual variables [field and tenor] are, in some sense, independent of language, even though they are constituted in language and the other semiotic systems of a culture. That is, they concern realities that exist alongside the reality created by language itself, semiotic reality. However, there is a third contextual variable that is specifically concerned with the part language is playing in any given context — the symbolic mode, how the linguistic resources are deployed. This covers both the medium (spoken, written, and various subtypes such as written in order to be spoken) and the rhetorical function — persuasive, didactic, informative, etc.
The context encompasses both the field of activity and the subject matter with which it is concerned (‘what’s going on, and what is it about?’) and the tenor of the relationship between the interactants, between speaker and listener, in terms of social rôles in general and those created through language in particular (‘who are taking part?). The field is thus the culturally recognised repertoires of social practices and concerns, and the tenor the culturally recognised repertoires of rôle relationships and interactive patterns.
The phenomena of human experience are held in tension by so many intersecting analogical lines that, while all of us have the same brains and live on the surface of the same planet, such diverse ways of semiotic mapping are not only possible but inevitable.
Some process types tend to lie on the borderline between major categories, forming mixed and overlapping categories; typical of these are the behavioural and existential proceses in English. It is likely that equivalent types of process will be liable to greater typological variation than those that fall squarely within the core categories of material, mental, and relational.
… we referred to projection as something that overlaps the ‘boundary’ between interpersonal and ideational metafunctional space; in English it is typically construed ideationally, though with a close relationship to the interpersonal systems of modality and mood. Other languages locate projection rather differently in relation to this boundary, sometimes foregrounding its interpersonal aspects, for example through a special category of ‘reporting’ mood.
We saw that in the experiential grammar of the English clause there was a complementarity of perspective between the transitive and the ergative: processes may be construed either as ‘one participant is doing something, which may or may not extend to another participant that is being done to’, or as ‘one participant is involved in something, which may or may not be brought about by another participant that is the agent of it’. Probably all languages display this transitive/ergative complementarity in their transitivity systems; but at the same time it appears at different depths and in different proportions.
As we have shown in the context of grammatical metaphor, the choice among alternative construals is made on the basis of both ideational and textual factors. These factors ‘conspire’ together so that different strategies are favoured in different registers: the congruent form (sequences) in casual speech, the metaphoric form (figures of being & having) in elaborated forms of writing.
The elasticity of construal is further increased through grammatical metaphor, which also relies on the manifestation of projection & expansion within participants (realised by the different types of modification in nominal groups). We have illustrated the range of options throughout the system at various points, and a schematic example will be enough here:
[i] logicalA happened, so B happened;A caused B to happen;
[ii] experientialA happened causing B / B happened because of AA happening caused B happeningA affected B [‘cause-happened’]
with additional metaphorical variants:B happened because of the happening of Athe happening of A caused the happening of Bthe happening of A was the cause of the happening of B
One major source of this kind of elasticity [construing phenomena as sequence or figure] is the manifestation of the very general semantic types of projection and expansion throughout the ideation base. In English, as we have shown, we find them manifested both logically as relations and experientially as elements within figures:
[i] logical manifestation:
as relations between figures in the construal of sequences (realised by clause complexes);as relations between processes in the construal of figures (realised by verbal group complexes);
[ii] experiential manifestation:as circumstances within figures (realised by prepositional phrases or adverbial groups);
as circumstantial processes within figures of being & having (realised by relational clauses);
as non-nuclear participants within figures, i.e., participants other than Medium — Agent, Beneficiary, Range (realised by nominal groups with or without a preposition).
Given that a process takes place in time, there will be some sense in which it has a beginning, a middle and an end. These may be observable as distinct constituents, if it is a process having duration; even if it is instantaneous, however, they represent possible facets, points of view from which it can be considered. In English, the meaning of a process typically includes it completion: if I ‘cut’ a piece of string, I cut it in two. To construe a process as non-completed, English uses conative or inceptive phase: ‘try to cut it’, ‘start to cut it’.
So whereas in English, each process in a figure (provided the figure is arguable — grammatically, one where the clause is finite) must be located somewhere in the construction of tense, in Chinese the process may be simply left as neutral, without being assigned to either category of aspect.
As in English, the process is the category of experience that is located in time. In English, time is construed grammatically as tense: as a flow, with a more or less extended ‘present’ forming a moving but impermeable barrier between ‘past’ and ‘future’; and each instance of a process is located somewhere in the flow. In Chinese, time is construed grammatically as aspect: and specifically as an opposition of unfolding versus culminating; and each instance of a process may be given a value in this opposition, either ‘significant as unfolding — in its own right’ or as ‘significant as culminating — perhaps by virtue of its consequences’.
… one property of language which is universal is the stratal organisation of the content plane into semantics and lexicogrammar, with the lexicogrammatical stratum forming a continuum: at one pole are the most “grammatical” features, closed systems of just two or three terms, mutually defining along a single dimension and with very general meanings and contexts of use; at the other pole are the most lexical features, open sets of an indefinite number of items, taxonomically arranged along various dimensions and with highly specific meanings and contexts of use.
The whole metaphorical elaboration [of the semantic system] is made possible by a fractal pattern that runs through the whole system. We have suggested that the metaphorical elaboration is a token–value relation; but in order for it to be a token–value relation within the semantic system, it has to be natural in the sense that the token and the value domains have to be similar enough to allow for the token to stand for the value. The principle behind this similarity is the fractal pattern of projection/expansion …
That is, while grammatical metaphor constitutes a move from one “phenomenal domain” to another … this move is made possible because fractal types engender continuity across these domains: the metaphorical move from one phenomenal domain to another takes place within the one and the same transphenomenal domain.
Thus if the domain of sequences is construed metaphorically within the domain of figures, the realisational domain in the grammar will automatically be that of metaphor: it will be the domain of clauses rather than that of clause complexes.
The proliferation of ideational meaning through metaphor thus also means that a person gains access to a wider repertoire of communicative rôles.
… the general tendency in the metaphorical move away from the congruent is away from the logical towards the experiential; and within the experiential towards the domain of participants in figures of being & having.
… metaphor involves a mapping from one ideational domain to another, construing a token–value relation between the two. For instance, the whole semantic domain of sequences may be mapped onto the domain of figures. The token domain may in turn be the value in a further metaphorical move, such as the move from figures to participants. The metaphorical expansion thus can involve multiple planes.
… metaphor is best construed as an opening up of a new dimension of the semantic system that allows the whole system to be elaborated by itself along a token–value chain. In other words, what we identified as a simplified way of dealing with grammatical metaphor in the relation between semantics and lexicogrammar … we can now recognise as a dimension internal to the semantic system.
Such a representation has to meet the kinds of ideational and textual demands that we have already considered in our representation of examples:
(i) ideational: the representation has to show that metaphor constitutes an expansion of the semantic system. The expansion is an elaborating one, creating chains of token–value relations; and it increases the semantic potential for construing experience.
(ii) textual: the representation has to make it possible to show how metaphorical and congruent variants are given different values in the text base — in the textual semantics.
… the metaphorical dimension in grammar is in reality a cline. There are often numerous intermediate steps between the “most congruent” and the “most metaphorical” wordings; indeed it is the scale of metaphoricity that is reasonably clearly defined, not its end points. Given two agnate wordings that are positioned along this scale, we seldom have any difficulty in locating them relative to each other: we know which of the two is the more metaphorical one. But we [would be] hard put to it to specify a point at either end where we feel we could go no further.
For most types of metaphor, it is important to take account of the fact that the metaphor represents more than one construction of goings-on; the metaphor adds a further perspective on the phenomenon being represented, without displacing the perspective that is congruent. […] The grammatical metaphor will typically show features of the congruent perspective as well as features of the metaphorical one.
It is the fact that metaphor multiplies meanings within the semantic system that opens up the possibility of metaphorical chains, with one congruent starting–point and another highly metaphorical end-point (A’’’ stands for A’’ stands for A’ stands for A … The semantic system is being expanded along the dimension of the metaphorical token–value relation; but the expansion is still within the semantic system itself.
The correspondence that is construed through grammatical metaphor is an elaborating relationship: an identity is set up between two patterns … In this identity, the metaphorical term is the ‘Token’ and the congruent term is the ‘Value’ … The identity holds between the two configurations as a whole; but … the components of the configurations are also mapped one onto another …The metaphorical relation is thus similar to inter-stratal realisation in that it construes a token–value type of relation. Here, however, the relation is intra-stratal: the identity holds between different meanings, not between meanings and wordings. The metaphor consists in relating different semantic domains of experience …
Almost all technical terms start out as grammatical metaphors; but they are grammatical metaphors which can no longer be unpacked. When a wording becomes technicalised, a new meaning has been construed — almost always, in our present-day construction of knowledge, a new thing (participating entity); and the junction with any more congruent agnates is (more or less quickly) dissolved.
… this provides an important insight into why experiential metaphors evolve in the first place, namely in order to get the texture right …
The system then comes to be expanded through shift in rank and class. Sequences come to be realised not only by clause complexes but also by clauses, and figures come to be realised not only by clauses but also by groups/phrases. They are pushed downward in complexity and rank relative to their congruent realisations in the grammar.
Categories in the ideation base are realised by those categories in the ideational grammar with which they have co-evolved. These are the congruent realisations that developed first in the language, are learnt first by children and tend to occur first in a text.
We noted above that the deployment of spatial metaphor in the construction of economic ‘knowledge’ serves, among other things, as an interface to another form of semiotic — that of using space symbolically in a diagrammatic representation of quantities. The same kind of principle of cross-over between semiotic modes applies to the construal of meaning in linguistics. We have relied in our own discussion on metaphors of abstract space for construing meaning — most centrally, metaphors of semantic networks and semantic space. These metaphors allow us to cross over to diagrams of symbolic space, viz. system networks (as a kind of acyclic directed graph) and topological representations. The system networks can, in turn, be restated algebraically, as in the various computational implementations of systemic accounts.
In the construction of meaning in economics, economic things such as prices, salaries, yields, financing are quantities. At the same time, they are also elastic bodies that grow and shrink; and also ‘mountaineers’, climbing up and down slopes. This at one level an impossible conjunction: things cannot be both quantities and mobile elastic bodies — but the semantic system of English makes this possible through lexicogrammatical metaphor. This proliferation of perspectives is part of the semogenic power of metaphor.
But the general phenomenon of metaphor, as an inherent property of language as a stratified semiotic, is a feature of the system as a whole — of the construal of meaning in lexicogrammatical terms.
And we should stress once again that to describe the “reality” that is construed in this way as being generalised does not imply that it is “coherent”, in the sense that it is internally consistent and unselfcontradictory. On the contrary: much of the power of metaphor derives from the tensions and contradictions set up (a) within the metaphor itself, (b) between one metaphor and another, and (c) between the metaphor and other regions of the ideation base.
This enables us to do two things. On the one hand, we can bring out a further aspect of the semantic picture by pointing to the conjunction of category meanings — an aspect of grammatical semantics — that is involved; and on the other hand, we can relate this particular metaphoric phenomenon to the overall semantic potential of the system — the construal of experience as a generalised ideation base.
So the more the extent of grammatical metaphor in a text, the more that text is loaded against the learner, and against anyone who is an outsider to the register in question. It becomes elitist discourse, in which the function of constructing knowledge goes together with the function of restricting access to that knowledge, making it impenetrable to all except those who have the means of admission to the inside, or the select group who are already there.
It is this other potential that grammatical metaphor has, for making meaning that is obscure, arcane and exclusive, that makes it ideal as a mode of discourse for establishing and maintaining status, prestige and hierarchy, and to establish the paternalistic authority of a technocratic elite …
Thus grammatical metaphor is a means of having things both ways. An element that is transcategorised loses its original status because of the nature of the semantic feature(s) with which it comes to be combined … A[n] element that is metaphorised does not lose its original status. Its construction is not triggered by its being associated with any new semantic feature. If it has a new semantic feature this is a result of the metaphorising process. … It has become a ‘junctional’ construct, combining two of the basic properties that the grammar evolved as it grew into a theory of experience.
… we have shown that the metaphorical version is not simply a meaningless (ie synonymous) variant of some congruent form; it is ‘junctional’ — that is, it embodies semantic features deriving from its own lexicogrammatical properties.
There is a loss of experiential meaning, since the configurational relations are inexplicit and so are many of the semantic features of the elements … There is a further loss of experiential meaning, since the categories of experience become blurred … the construction of reality becomes a construction of unreality, detached from ordinary experience and hence inaccessible and remote. …
There is however a gain in the potential for experiential information, because the participant, more than any other element, can be expanded in respect of [sic] a wide range of semantic features; this enables anything construed as a thing to become part of an experiential taxonomy which embodies far greater generalisation about the overall nature of experience.
There is an increase in textual meaning, since participants have the most clearly defined status as information: in particular, they can be construed (by the thematic and information systems) into a ‘backgrounded + foregrounded’ pattern which maximises the information potential of the figure.
In English, then, the metaphoric movement is from the logical towards the experiential and, within the experiential, from processes to things […] towards a more highly taxonomised way of meaning.
We can say therefore that grammatical metaphor is predominantly a ‘nominalising’ tendency. But if we look at it semantically we can see that it is a shift from the logical to the experiential: that is, making maximum use of the potential that the system has evolved for classifying experience, by turning all phenomena into the most classifiable form — or at least into a form that is more classifiable than that in which they have been congruently construed.
This represents a shift one step ‘backwards’ along the logical-experiential scale. It is thus contrary to the prevailing general tendency, since something that is congruently a participant on its own terms is now treated as existing only by virtue of some other participant. … This perturbation of the dominant pattern has the effect of making a participant more abstract.
It is these characteristics of relators [the transphenomenality and fractality of the expansion relations they construe] that make them particularly liable to migrate: to be displaced metaphorically from their congruent status (as paratactic and hypotactic conjunctions) and to appear in other guises in other locations — as minor processes (in circumstantial elements), as processes, as qualities and as things. Thanks to this metaphoric instability, relators are able to play a central part in the re-construal of experience that is a feature of the discourse of the sciences — that makes these discourses possible, in fact, and hence provides the semiotic foundation for the construction of scientific knowledge.
…the relators are the most unstable in terms of their susceptibility to metaphoric transformation. They are, as it were, the first to leave, and they travel farther than the rest. We can perhaps link this property of relators to their status in the overall ideation base. Relators construe the highly generalised logico-semantic relations of expansion that join figures into sequences: elaborating, extending, enhancing. […] these relationships of expansion pervade very many regions of the semantic system: they are manifested in the organisation of figures of being, in the types of circumstantial element that occur within a figure, in the taxonomy of ‘things’, and elsewhere, as well as of course in their ‘home’ region of the construal of sequences , as links between one figure and another. That led us to characterise the categories of expansion as “transphenomenal” and as “fractal”: transphenomenal in the sense that they re-appear across the spectrum of different types of phenomena construed by the ideational system; and fractal in the sense that they serve as general principles of the construal of experience, generating identical patterns of organisation of variable magnitude and in variable semantic environments.
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 for closed systems. So there is 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.
… by construing any phenomenon of experience as a thing, we give it the maximum potential for semantic elaboration. … the more structure that is to be imposed on experience the more pressure there is to construe it in the form of things.
Relators show the least organisation of any, since they are experienced indirectly in the form of logical relations between other configurations; they share some of the systematic features of minor processes, but other than that they display only the contrast between the two relative statuses they assign to these configurations, as being equal or unequal (paratactic / hypotactic in the grammar) — a then x / x after a // b so y / y because b &c. Thus a relator can be metaphorically reconstrued into any other category … whereas a process can be construed only as a participant (quality or thing), and a quality only as a thing.
The minor processes that form circumstances (realised as prepositions in English) are even less taxonomisable; they are intermediate between processes and relators, and only the spatial ones (spatio-temporal) display any real paradigmatic organisation (to / from // towards / away from; inside / outside // into / out of; before / after // in front of / behind &c.).
Processes thus have much less potential than participants for being characterised and taxonomised. For example, with a process like decide we can add a circumstance to it, saying he decided quickly or he decided on the spur of the moment; but if we want to identify the occasion as unique we have to say this decision, the previous decision, the only good decision he ever made. We can say his absurd decision but not he decided absurdly — at least not in the same sense, since absurdly could only characterise the figure (how he carried out the act of deciding), not the quality of the process of deciding as such.
Processes do resemble other processes, but they share different features with different others; no single line-up is dominant enough to form the basis for permanent hyponymy. For example, if we consider a small subset of the words expressing verbal processes offer, tell, promise, threaten, recommend, warn:
(1) offer, promise, threaten have the feature ‘offer’; tell, recommend, warn have the feature ‘command’
(2) offer, tell are neutral in orientation; promise, threaten, recommend, warn have the feature ‘oriented to addressee’
(3) within the addressee-oriented, promise, recommend have the feature ‘desirable’, threaten, warn have the feature ‘undesirable’.
(4) offer, promise, recommend take direct participant (‘propose to give … to Receiver’; ‘propose that Receiver should obtain …’).
(5) tell, warn take circumstance of Matter ‘about …’.
Processes are realised by verbal groups, where, typically, the only lexical material is the verb itself, functioning as Event (material action or event, conscious or verbal process, or relation). Apart from the adverbial complement of a phrasal verb, which may serve to construct a distinct lexical item e.g. make out (I can’t make out the difference), come to (she’ll come to in a minute), let on (don’t let on about this), &c., all contrasts made by the verbal group are grammatical ones — tense and other quasi-temporal systems, and modality. There is no lexical expansion classifying processes into taxonomies or assigning them sets of contrasting qualities.
Qualities are attached to things, and so contribute to this overall expansion [of participants]. They also have possibilities of expansion of their own, by submodification (at least for intensity, but sometimes along other lines as well: very long, dark blue, red hot).
Participants are realised by nominal groups, which allow more or less indefinite expansion (through the univariate structure of modification). This expansion is the grammar’s way of constructing taxonomies of things: grouping them into classes, assigning properties to them, quantifying them and then uniquely identifying any individual thing, or any number, set or class of things in relation to the “here–&–now” of the speech event. the expansion involves open sets of things and qualities, realised by lexical items; but it can also capture a circumstance, realised by a prepositional phrase, or an entire figure, realised by a clause, and put it to use as a quality in describing or identifying such a thing or set of things, e.g. this unique 20-piece handpainted china dinner service with optional accessories never before offered for sale at such a bargain price.
… the drift towards ‘thinginess’ is the culminating and most clearly articulated form of a shift which can be characterised in more general terms as a shift towards the experiential — towards that mode of construing experience that is most readily organised into paradigmatic sets and contrasts. Things are more easily taxonomised than qualities, qualities than processes, and processes more easily than circumstances or relations. Since the ‘noun-ness’ is being used to construe phenomena that start out as something else than a noun, metaphors will inevitably be abstract.
It is possible to distinguish two predominant motifs in the phenomena characterised here: one major or primary and one minor or secondary one.
(i) The primary motif is clearly the drift towards ‘thing’.
(ii) The secondary motif is what appears as a tendency in the opposite direction: the move from ‘thing’ into what might be interpreted as a manifestation of ‘quality’ (qualifying, possessive or classifying expansions of the 'thing').
In the semantic construction of experience, ‘process’ and ‘participant’ emerge as prototypical categories […]. But as in any semiotic endeavour there are always some domains of uncertainty; are rain, wind, thunder processes or things? Are fear, worry, regret processes or qualities? Examples like these prevent the categories from being too reified and rigid, and provide a kind of gateway of analogy through which a phenomenon can drift or be propelled from one category to another.
In transcategorisation some other semantic feature triggers the propulsion; e.g. dark + make/become = darken, flake + like/composed of = flaky. In metaphor, however, the phenomenon is reconstrued as another category; what is being exploited is the potential that arises — but only after the categories have first been construed as distinct; not otherwise — of treating every phenomenon in more ways than one. In this process the original interpretation is not supplanted; it is combined with the new one into a more complex whole.
Rank shift is not inherently metaphorical. There is a parallel here between rank shift and class shift. In origin, both these could be described as metaphorical semogenic processes: a verb or adjective is metamorphosed into a noun (a shift of class, e.g. strong : strength, lose : loss), a clause is metamorphosed into a group (a shift of rank, e.g. they went bankrupt : their bankruptcy). But as a synchronic relation neither of these necessarily involves metaphor; there may be no systematic alternation such as there is between a metaphoric and a congruent form. We have already discussed non-metaphorical forms of class shift, under the heading of transcategorisation. […] Class shift becomes metaphorical when the “shifted” term creates a semantic junction with the original.
The overall effect of the grammatical metaphor is that semantic relations between one element and another, and between one figure and another, become progressively less explicit as the degree of metaphoricity increases.
Those illustrated here are variants of the figure => element syndrome, where only part of the figure is reconstrued as a participant…
(1) They surveyed the property => (They) did a survey of the property(2) They started to survey the property => (They) started a survey of the property(3) They discussed in the early afternoon => Their discussion took place (in the early afternoon)
Here the syndrome … occurs in a more general environment, that of construing a sequence on the model of a figure — grammatically, the sequence is construed not as a clause complex but as a clause.they shredded the documents before they departed for the airport => they shredded the documents before their departure for the airport
they shredded the documents before they departed for the airport => their shredding of the documents preceded their departure for the airportThese examples of a ‘sequence => figure’ metaphor both involve a sequence of the expansion type. However, this type of metaphoric shift also occurs with projection sequences; for example:The colonel declared his innocence.— where the congruent form would be a projection, either hypotactic or paratactic:The colonel declared that he was innocent.
The colonel declared, “I am innocent”.
Here a figure is being construed metaphorically on the model of a participant: grammatically, the figure is construed not as a clause but as a nominal group. There is a shift in rank from figure to element, and concomitantly a shift in status among the elements making up the construction.
he was arrested by the police => his arrest by the police
(…) bond rapidly => rapid bonding occurs
the group decided yesterday => yesterday’s decision by the group
the accused appeared to be innocent => the apparent innocence of the accused
he argues cogently => the cogency of his argument
These syndromes of elemental metaphors fall into three general types, not very sharply distinct but worth using as a conceptual framework. The distinction relates to the rank where the metaphoric reconstrual takes place: (I) from figure to element, (II) from sequence to figure, (III) from figure with process to figure with process as thing.
Syntagmatically, instances of grammatical metaphor typically occur not in isolation but in organic clusters or “syndromes”. Paradigmatically, there will typically be other wordings intermediate between an instance of grammatical metaphor and its “most congruent” agnate variant.
Note that where the grammar has a simple verbal group, this construes a single ‘process’ element in the figure. Where the clause contains a verbal group complex, while this (congruently) still construes a single ‘process’ it is now somewhere along the cline towards a sequence of two figures. Thus: the government deregistered the union —> the government moved to deregister the union —> the government moved/acted (in order) to deregister the union.
A sequence is construed congruently by the grammar as a clause nexus joined by a conjunction. A nexus may be either paratactic or hypotactic. Where the sequence is construed paratactically, the preferred order is the iconic one; thus in the case of ‘time’ and ‘cause’, “precedent, then subsequent”, “cause, so effect”. The alternative causal sequence “effect, for cause” (as in I strove with none, for none was worth my strife) is rather infrequent; while the alternative temporal sequence apparently does not occur.
(These relationships can of course be expressed cohesively — that is, without being construed as grammatical structures at all: I strove with none. The reason was that … .)
Where the sequence is construed hypotactically, either order is possible: “after precedent, subsequent” / “subsequent, after precedent”; “because cause, effect” / “effect, because cause”.
Note also “precedent, before subsequent” / “before subsequent, precedent”; “cause, so that effect” / “so that effect, cause” — where tying the relator to the ‘effect’ typically implies intentionality. …
The reason for this disparity is that hypotaxis construes an order of its own — ordering in dependence; whereas in parataxis, the only ordering is that being imposed by the grammar on the experiential phenomena themselves.
When we find grammatical metaphors in discourse, they nearly always cluster into what we are calling syndromes; these are typical clusterings of metaphorical effects among which there is some kind of interdependence (for example, in the government decided => the government’s decision, there is an obvious relationship between decide => decision, process as thing, and the government => the government’s, participant as possessor of the thing).
Metaphoric elements […] are junctional in that they embody a junction of two semantic categories. In previous chapters, 3–5, we dealt just with elements that could be assigned to a single category: process, thing, quality &c. We shall refer to these as ‘ordinary’ elements, and contrast them with ‘junctional’ elements which are those that embody grammatical metaphor. Junctional elements will always have two categories in their description, e.g. ‘process thing’, ‘circumstantial quality’, ‘relator process’.
… it seems that meaning-making by transcategorising has evolved, through intermediate stages, into meaning-making by metaphorising; there is no sharp line between deriving a thing from a process, as ‘one who makes’, ‘that which is made’, and construing a process as a thing ‘making, creation’; with ‘action of making, act of making’ somewhere in between.
What is the status of such fictitious objects or pseudo-things? Unlike the other elements, which lose their original status in being transcategorised (for example shaker is no longer a process, even though it derives from shake), these elements do not: shakiness is still a quality, development is still a process — only they have been construed into things. They are thus a fusion, or ‘junction’, of two semantic elemental categories: shakiness is a ‘quality thing’, development is a ‘process thing’. All such junctional elements involve grammatical metaphor.
What for example would be the semantic interpretation of [the transcategorisations] shakiness, awakening, analysis, development? Here we find ourselves using precisely the terms of our own metalanguage in the definition: ‘quality of being shaky’, ‘process of being awake, or causing to become awake’, ‘process of analysing, developing’. When this happens, it is a signal that a phenomenon of this other kind — quality or process — is being treated as if it was a thing. The grammar has constructed an imaginary or fictitious object, called shakiness, by transcategorising the quality shaky; similarly, by transcategorising the process develop it has created a pseudo-thing called development.
The phenomenon of transcategorising elements would seem to be a feature of the grammar of every language. This implies two things: (i) that each etymon belongs inherently to a major class; (ii) that at least some etymons can be transferred to another class — by some means, syntactic and/or morphological.
But the interpersonal significance of grammatical metaphor is likely to be felt most clearly at the macroscopic level, in the overall pattern of interpersonal relationships, and the ideological orientation, that emerge over the course of a text.
In a similar way, phenomena in the ideation base also map onto constructs of interpersonal meaning. For example, a congruent figure maps onto a move in a dialogic exchange; it is enacted interpersonally as a proposition or a proposal. It follows that when phenomena are reconstrued metaphorically within the ideation base, there are also interpersonal consequences. For instance, the figure ‘atomic nucleus + absorb + energy’ can be enacted interpersonally as a proposition that is open to negotiation: The atomic nucleus absorbs energy — Does it? — Yes, it does — No, it can’t. However, when this figure is reconstrued as the participant ‘absorption (+ of energy) (+ by atomic nucleus)’, it no longer has the potential for being enacted interpersonally as a proposition; rather, it would be taken for granted in discourse. You can’t argue with the absorption of energy by the nucleus since it is not enacted as an arguable proposition. Such interpersonal differences can have a powerful rhetorical effect in persuasive discourse. (There is an analogous effect with respect to proposals in regulatory discourse.)
Ideationally, grammatical metaphor is a resource for reconstruing experience so that, alongside congruent configurations, we also have alternative metaphorical ones. At the same time, these different configurations map onto different textual patterns. For example, a figure maps onto a message; but a participant maps onto part of a message, so that a figure construed as if it was a participant can be given a textual status within that message.
The metaphoric shift does not mean that the natural relationship between meaning and wording is destroyed; rather, this relationship is extended further when new domains of realisation are opened up to semantic categories through metaphor. The shift does however create a greater distance from the everyday experience; the metaphorical mode of construal makes it possible to recast that everyday experience, retaining only certain features from the congruent wording but adding others that it did not include.
The metaphors we are considering here are in fact all shifts within the ideational realm — from sequence to figure, from figure to participant, and so on — and their primary effect is ideational. They constitute a resource for reconstruing experience along certain lines, redeploying the same categories that have evolved in the congruent mode of construing experience.
The significant point is that the Theme of an English clause has to be nominal. Not that there cannot exist other kinds of Theme — adverbials, prepositional phrases or even verbs; but these construe Themes which are highly marked (verbal Themes in particular), embodying features of contrast which are not appropriate in these contexts. The only kind of grammatical entity that construes the message in precisely the way required, without special effects, is a nominal — which may be a nominal group or else a nominalised clause or clause complex.
If the Theme of a clause (realised as the element in first position) is also explicitly located as Given, this has a very strong ‘backgrounding’ effect: the message is ‘you already know this; now use it as a stepping-off point for a further move, to something you don’t know’. By the same token, the remainder of the clause (either the whole of it or the culminating element) is strongly ‘foregrounded’. The total construction is obviously a powerful device for reasoning and argumentation.