Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 274):
Lakoff's conclusion is that, while we cannot avoid such an all-pervasive outbreak of metaphor, we can learn to recognise it and to understand the harmful effects it may have ("that it can kill", in his formulation); we may also be able to seek more benign forms of metaphor to replace it.
Looking at such examples in our own terms, we would want to add another dimension to the interpretation, by seeing the metaphoric process as essentially a lexicogrammatical one and pointing to the grammatical element in the overall construct. 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.