Wednesday 21 October 2020

How Far Should Metaphor Be Unpacked?

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 730):
How far should one pursue the analysis of ideational metaphors? There can be no universally valid answer to this question; it depends on what one is trying to achieve. In an example such as The second day of the convention saw the advantage pushed further, there is an obvious tension between day as Senser and saw as mental Process which needs explaining (cf. Figure 10-13). But in most instances of contemporary discourse it is only when we start to analyse that we become aware of the grammatical metaphors involved.