Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 293, 294):
These considerations suggest to us that 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 in Figure 6-8 we can now recognise as a dimension internal to the semantic system. Figure 6-20 shows this opening up of a metaphorical dimension within the semantic system.
Each 'plane' has the same kind of interface to the textual metafunction. In choosing whether to construe some phenomenon as a sequence of figures or as a sequence reconstrued as a figure, we can thus also compare the implications for the textual presentation of these alternative ideational articulations as quanta of information.
Each plane also has the same realisational potential in the lexicogrammar. 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 the metaphor: it will be the domain of clauses rather than that of clause complexes.
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Cf Fig 6-8 (p282):
