Metaphor, Elitist Discourse, Status, Prestige And Authority

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 272): 

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 of those 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 whose message is 'this is all too hard for you to understand; so leave the decision-making to us' (see Lemke, 1990b). Even those who most exploit its potential for organising and constructing knowledge — theoretical physicists and other specialists in the natural sciences —- are now finding that they have had 'too much of a good thing' and are seeking ways of overcoming it and carrying it to less extreme manifestations.

Grammatical Metaphor And Pedagogy

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 271-2):

Metaphors are dangerous, however, they have too much power, and grammatical metaphor is no different in this respect. Because it leaves the relations within a figure almost totally inexplicit, this demands that they should be in some sense already in place. In the typical rhetorical context for the highly favoured 'backgrounding' type, as we have seen, the configurational relations have been established in the preceding discourse: cf. ... if one takes alcohol one's brain rapidly becomes dull. Alcohol's rapid dulling effect on the brain... Here by the time we reach the metaphor they are already in place: we know that rapid dulling effect means 'causes ... rapidly to become dull', not any of the other things it might mean such as 'has an effect which soon becomes dull, or blunted'. 

But this is an idealised example, constructed for the purpose. Usually the configurational pattern will have been built up over long stretches of the text, or (especially if it is a technical form of discourse) over a great variety of different texts — for example, a series of textbooks used in teaching a science subject throughout a school. Very often the learner has to construct the configurational relations from various sources without their being made fully explicit in any one place; and in the limiting (but by no means unusual) case they have never been made explicit at all, so that the figure has to be construed from the metaphor — a very difficult task indeed.

Metaphor As Junctional Construct

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 271, 272):

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 (e.g. 'like ...' is a quality; so when we say mousy 'like a mouse' this is only a quality — it has none of the thing-ness of the original mouse). A 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 as a result of the metaphorising process. So failure is both process and thing: it is a process construed as a thing (or rather, a phenomenon construed as a process and reconstrued as a thing); its initial status as process remains, but because it has been nominalised, and the prototypical meaning of a noun is a thing, it also acquires a semantic status as something that participates in processes: see Figure 6-4. It has become a 'junctional' construct, combining two of the basic properties that the grammar evolved as it grew into a theory of experience.

Summary Interpretation Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 270-1):

We can then summarise our interpretation of grammatical metaphor as follows.

(1) 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.

(2) There is a loss of experiential meaning, since the configurational relations are inexplicit and so are many of the semantic features of the elements (e.g. engine failure : an engine / engines // the engine / the engines; failed / fail / will fail &c.)

(3) There is a further loss of experiential meaning, since the categories of experience become blurred (failure is not most obviously felt as a 'thing', otherwise it would have been construed as such in the first place); the construction of reality becomes a construction of unreality, detached from ordinary experience and hence inaccessible and remote.

(4) 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 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.

Metaphor In Registers Intermediate Between The Everyday And The Educational

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 270):

Another type that is also not specifically associated with learned discourse — with the registers of educational knowledge — is that of be/go + minor process => process: for example:

her speech covered five points ('was about')

the road skirts the lake ('goes alongside')

shall I accompany you? ('go with')

this replaces the one you had before ('is instead of)

who does she resemble most? ('is like')

These are not in the language of a pre-school child; they are learnt as the written language of the primary school, intermediate between the commonsense language of daily life in the home and the technicalised educational discourse of the secondary school.

The Basis Of Metaphorical Shift In Everyday Spoken Discourse

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 269-70):

In English, then, the metaphoric movement is from the logical towards the experiential and, within the experiential, from processes to things … a shift towards a more highly taxonomised way of meaning. But the basis for such a shift is found in the ordinary spoken language of everyday discourse. Consider the following series of examples:

You made three mistakes.

That was his biggest mistake.

Give it another big push.

She gave him one of her most heart-warming smiles.

Can't I have just two little bites of your cake?

That last dive was the best dive I've ever done.

All these are instances of grammatical metaphor, with 'mistake' (verb err), push, smile, bite, dive turned into things (nouns) and the 'process' taking the form of a lexically very general verb give, have, do, take, make which retains the full semantic potential of a figure (tense, modality, &c.). The effect of nominalising these processes is to open them up to all the 'quality' potential that is associated with things: they can be classified, qualified, quantified, identified and described. This range of grammatical metaphors has become fully codified in English and is, in fact, used by children almost from the start.

Grammatical Metaphor Viewed Semantically

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 269):

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 towards 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. 

We saw in discussing have a look, make a mistake &c. that if you make look, mistake into nouns you can expand them within nominal groups: have another good long look, don't make the same silly spelling mistake again! We now have classes of mistake (spelling mistake); properties, both experiential (long look) and interpersonal (silly mistake), quantities, and identities (that same mistake, another look, three mistakes). The same principle holds when any process is reconstrued metaphorically as a thing.

The Effect Of The Secondary Motif Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 268-9):

This perturbation of the dominant pattern has the effect of making a participant more abstract. In the engine failed, the engine is set up as a thing. In engine failure, it is as it were deconstructed into a mere characteristic of some other 'thing', a way of classifying failure into its various contrasting kinds, such as crop failure, power failure and heart failure. The engine has lost its identity — it has no Deictic (note that it cannot be individuated any longer — only the failure can: this engine failure, the earlier engine failure, any future engine failures, etc.); and it has exchanged 'thingness' with an ephemeral process, that of failing. But it is still within the compass of a participant in the figure; grammatically, it is within the nominal group.

The Secondary Motif Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 268):

The "secondary motif" is that whereby a 'thing' (congruently construed as a noun functioning as Thing in a nominal group) is metaphorised on the model of some quality — qualifying, possessive or classifying. 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 type of shift occurs only in syndromes, where the process is reconstrued as a participant; and as a corollary, the participants in that process become its 'qualities'. For example, Griffith's energy balance approach to strength and fracture, where the participants strength and fracture and energy balance have become 'qualities' expanding the metaphoric 'thing' approach — compare the more congruent Griffith approached strength and fracture in terms of (the concept of) energy balance.

Reasons For The Metaphoric Instability Of Relators

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 267-8):

It is clear that, among the various elements involved, 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. We have remarked already on the fact that 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. This 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.

It is these characteristics of relators 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 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.

The Metaphorical Potential Of Relators

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 266-7):

Relators show the least organisation of any, since they are experienced only 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 reconstrued only as a participant (quality or thing), and a quality only as a thing.

The Taxonomic Limitations Of Minor Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 266):

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.).

The Taxonomic Limitations Of Processes Exemplified

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 265-6):

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 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.

The Taxonomic Limitations Of Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 265):

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.

Blogger Comments:

Importantly, although a Process is realised by a phrasal verb, the 'adverbial complement' of a phrasal verb is not a constituent of the verbal group.

Why Metaphoric Shift Is Towards Thing

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 265):

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 handprinted china dinner service with optional accessories never before offered for sale at such a bargain price.

Qualities are attached to things, and so contribute to this overall expansion. They also have possibilities of expansion of their own, by submodification (at least for intensity, but sometimes along other lines as well: very long, longest; dark blue, red hot). … 

This grammatical potential for taxonomising is complemented by the lexical potential of the nominal group for construing feature networks. So by construing any phenomenon of experience as a thing, we give it the maximum potential for semantic elaboration.

Metaphoric Shift As A Shift Towards The Experiential

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 264):

… we can summarise the principle of metaphoric shift as in Figure 6-3 …

We can see from this figure that 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. If the surgeon makes an incision, instead of cutting, the cut is being presented as a more abstract version of the experience. This is further reinforced if, as is often the case, the metaphorical term comes from the more highly valued lexical stockpile of Latin and Greek roots.

Two Predominant Motifs In Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 263-4):

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').

Interpretation Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 263):

In the semantic construction of experience, 'process' and 'participant' emerge as prototypical categories; and there is a broad agreement among different languages both about the nature of this distinction and about which particular phenomena should be assigned to which category. 

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.

Metaphors Of External And Internal Conjunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 262-3):

At the same time, a further distinction has evolved between two kinds of logical-semantic relation: 

(i) a relation 'in rebus' between two experiential events, 

(ii) a relation 'in verbis between two stages in the discourse; 

e.g.

(i) Political pressures brought about his downfall. Major changes ensued.

(ii) This section illustrates the main argument. Further discussion follows.

These correspond respectively to the 'external' and 'internal' types of conjunctive relations in cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: Ch. 5).

The Favourite Type Of Clause In Modern Scientific English

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 262):

These two syndromes [see previous post] — really variants of a single syndrome — define the type of clause that might well be considered as the favourite type of modern scientific English.  

The metaphorical 'things' are packaged processes or qualities that have thematic or informational value in the text, construed as Theme in the clause or New in the information unit (N-Rheme in the clause: see Fries, 1992).  

The metaphorical 'process' is one of the typical semantic relations that link figures into a sequence: 'cause* & 'time' are the prototypical relations in question, but in modern writing 'identity' has tended to take over as the central type — often by a further metaphorical step whereby causes becomes is the cause of, results becomes is the result of.

Syndromes Including Both Class Shift And Rank Shift

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 262):

We have shown that the typical manifestation of grammatical metaphor in discourse is as a 'syndrome' of features including both class shift and rank shift. Let us now recall two of the frequently occurring syndromes described earlier, noting where these features occur:

(1) Their frequent dismissal of personnel does not inspire people's confidence 

[class shift]:  process 'dismiss' as thing, relator 'cause' as process ['inspire'], quality 'confident' as thing
[rankshift]: sequence as figure

[congruent variant]: Because they frequently dismiss personnel, people are not confident [in them]

(2) Rapid bonding resulted 

[class shift]: process 'bond' as thing, relator 'cause' as process
[rankshift]: none (figure as figure)

[congruent variant]: As a result [the substances] rapidly bonded.

Note that in (2) the other term in the relation is to be presumed from the preceding text.

Rank Shift As An Alternative To Metaphorical Class Shift

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 261):

… we find that rank shift sometimes operates as an alternative to class shift of this metaphorical kind. In examples A-1 and A-2, there is metaphorical class shift:

A-1 a cow is a ruminating quadruped [verb: adjective; process => quality]

A-2 your escape was a miracle [verb: noun; process => thing]

In B-1 and B-2, on the other hand, there is rank shift but no class shift; these are the agnate congruent forms:

B-1 a cow is a quadruped that chews the cud/ that ruminates

B-2 it was a miracle how/that you got away/ you escaped

Here 'ruminate' and 'escape' remain as process, without shifting in class. This now helps to explain the meaning of forms such as C-1 and C-2:

C-1 a cow is a cud-chewing quadruped

C-2 it was a miracle you/your getting away

These represent a kind of semantic compromise, a means of having it both ways. The junction is now as it were symmetrical, with the time line removed, so that 'chew + cud', 'you + escape' are simultaneously both figures and (parts of) elements. What the grammar is construing here is an exchange of functions without shifting class; the figure takes on a special kind of clausal structure which conserves the transitivity relations.

Metaphorical vs Non-Metaphorical Class Shift

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 260-1):

Class shift becomes metaphorical when the "shifted" term creates a semantic junction with the original. A good way of illustrating this is to bring together two instances of the same lexical item, used once as (non-metaphorical) transcategorisation and once as grammatical metaphor. Let us return to a previous example:

More congruently, this would be many (pieces of glass) fail after the cracks have slowly extended, or often the cracks slowly extend and then the glass fails. The congruent form is a sequence of two figures linked by a relator; in the metaphoric form, each figure becomes a participant and the relator becomes a (relational) process to which two participants subscribe. Here, then, failure is an instance of metaphorical class shift; there is a semantic junction between two features:

(1) 'process' (class meaning of verb fail),

(2) 'thing/ participant' (class meaning of noun failure).

Note that there is an asymmetry between the two — a time line, such that the feature 'thing' is as it were a reconstrual of the original feature 'process': we could gloss it as "a process reconstrued as a participant".

Contrast this now with failure in a technical expression such as heart failure; in origin this was no doubt a grammatical metaphor for the heart fails, but the metaphorical quality has since been lost, or at least significantly weakened (the metaphor is "dead"), and heart failure is now the only congruent form.

Likewise contrast he regretted his failure to act, agnate to that he had failed to act (or that he had not acted ), where failure is a grammatical metaphor, with he always felt that he was a failure, where failure is now the congruent form and this is not a metaphorical agnate of he always felt that he had failed.

Metaphor And Rankshift

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 259-60):

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. Similarly, in the following examples of rank shift, where a clause is rankshifted to function either as Head (1,2) or as Qualifier (3, 4) of a nominal group, no grammatical metaphor is involved.

1. [[Not having a proper job]] made my life unbearable

(semantically) non-projected figure as participant

(grammatically) clause (as Head of nominal group) functioning (as Agent) in clause structure: "act" type

2. [[How they escaped]] was a mystery

(semantically) projected figure as participant

(grammatically) clause (as Head of nominal group) functioning (as Carrier) in clause structure: "fact" type

3. That woman [[(who was) sitting behind the desk]] reminded me of Tracy

(semantically) non-projected figure as quality

(grammatically) clause functioning as Qualifier of nominal group ("defining relative" clause)

4. The idea ([that anyone would visit/ of anyone visiting]] seems incredible

(semantically) projected figure as quality

(grammatically) clause functioning as Qualifier of nominal group

The Overall Effect Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 258-9):

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. We can illustrate this by taking a text example and relating it to more congruent and more metaphorical variants:

Notice how the semantic information construed by the grammar in the most congruent version is gradually lost at each step in the course of metaphoric rewording.

The Phylogenetic Codification Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 258):

Like lexical metaphors, so also grammatical metaphors may become codified in the language and 'take over' as the normal mode of expression. We shall refer below to two instances of this type in English: those like have a look, take a step and those like span, cover, accompany. There are other features of the grammar that are in origin metaphorical (many of the uses of the possessive form, such as [he didn't approve of] my leaving home), but whose origin is so obscured by the natural evolution of the language that all sense of their metaphoric nature has long since been lost.

Degree Of Metaphoricity

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 256-7):

… metaphoricity is a relative matter. We can take a pair of agnate expressions and order them with respect to each other, showing that one of the two is more congruent But if we are rewording in either direction — 'packing' or 'unpacking', to use the (lexical) metaphor that was adopted for this by the students to whom it was originally presented —, there is no clearly definable point where we say 'now we have reached the end'. Obviously we cannot go on for very long; the actual number of steps taken will in fact be extremely limited. But any sequence that is reasonably complex in its semantic patterning will be likely to show considerable elasticity at both ends of the continuum.

Illustration Of Steps In Unpacking Elemental Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 255-6):

It would take many pages of discussion to follow through such examples discursively in any detail. Instead we will present one brief example with step-by-step unpacking of all the grammatical metaphors simultaneously, using a form of graphic display (with labelling of grammatical functions) which will give a sense of the overall metaphorical space that may be covered in a single instance of this kind: see Figure 6-2. 

Figure 6-2 Step by step "unpacking" of metaphorical wording

Example Of Steps In Unpacking Elemental Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 255):

Very often, however, in deriving any one element we should have to take two or more steps in the course of unpacking. For example, in the development of our understanding, we can unpack to our understanding develops. However, our understanding is itself a metaphorical entity consisting of a 'thing' derived from a process; and a 'possessor' derived from a participant; so it can be unpacked further to we understand, giving something like [the way] we understand develops. We then might want to consider develops as (be/ become) quality => process, so [the extent to which] we understand becomes greater, i.e. we understand more and more.

Elemental Metaphor Syndrome: Figure With Process ==> Figure With Process As Thing

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 254-5):

(III) Figure With Process ==> Figure With Process As Thing

They surveyed the property ==> (They) did a survey of the property

They started to survey the property ==> (They) started a survey of the property

They discussed in the early afternoon ==> Their discussion took place (in the early afternoon)