This [ideational metaphor] is a designed, or at least semi-designed, extension of the “experiential” way of looking at phenomena. It suits the “crystalline”, written mode of being; and in particular, as already said, it suits the elaborated discourses of organised knowledge, because it is good to think with — it enables you to build well-ordered conceptual structures and to spin tangled skeins of reasoning. High lexical density is the price to be paid.
Grammatical intricacy [logical metafunction] and lexical density [experiential metafunction] are two ways of managing complexity: different strategies for transforming complex phenomena into edifices of meaning [ideational metafunction]. They are not intrinsically tied to the speech / writing complementarity; they derive from two variants both of which evolved in spoken language as a typological variable in the construal of complex processes.
Grammatical intricacy can be measured as the number of ranking clauses in the clause complex. But this is more problematic: partly because it requires criteria for identifying the limits of a clause complex in spoken discourse, and partly because it makes no sense to calculate it as a mean. The reasons for this have nothing to do with the way spoken language construes experience; they are not ideational but interpersonal. Spoken language is inherently dialogic in nature, with very many short turns guiding the interaction; whereas intricate clause complex structures can only occur in the more monologic interludes in the dialogue. Thus the mean figure for intricacy would be essentially meaningless.
Lexical density can be measured as the number of lexical items (“content words”) per ranking clause. (A “ranking clause” is one that is functioning as a clause, independent or dependent; not “rank-shifted” to become part of something else.) Since it is a comparative measure, it does not matter exactly where the line between content words and function words is drawn, provided it is drawn consistently for all the texts under study.
The complexity of spoken language is, as I put it, choreographic; it can build up quite elaborately structured clauses, and string these out in equally elaborate clause complexes, giving a commonsense picture of the world that is intricate but not dense: intricate in movement, like a dance, but not on the other hand very densely packed. It is rather explicit in showing the semantic relationships among its various components. By contrast, the complexity of written language could be described as crystalline: its clauses tend to be rather simple in structure, but they can be extremely dense, with the elements compressed into lengthy expansions of words, most typically nominal groups, and the semantic relations among the constituent elements very largely left implicit — for the informed reader to supply. I have referred to these two types of complexity as “grammatical intricacy” and “lexical density” respectively.
Once both grammars are in place, however, by the time the child enters secondary school, the two form complementary constructions of reality. Technical knowledge is construed almost entirely in these metaphoric terms. But since every adolescent started life as a child, the primary commonsense grammar is still in place, and the picture of the world that is being built up by language is not just the reconstructed version but a composite. The result is a multi-faceted perspective on reality which, if you come to terms with it, gives a plausible representation of the contemporary human environment.
… there are various reasons why this metaphoric [nominal-based] kind of grammar is associated with writing while the congruent, clause-based grammar is associated with speech. The metaphoric grammar could not function as the primary construction of reality — “primary” in the sense of the child’s mother tongue, the grammar through which experience is first construed. This is because this grammar is interpretable only as a transformation of something else: only as metaphor, in fact. … This kind of grammar can only function as a secondary construal of experience — just as writing can only function as a secondary construal of meaning, because writing is also metaphoric to speech.
A technical term […] is a dead metaphor, one that can no longer be “unpacked” — replaced by a non-metaphorical expression.
In metaphor in its traditional sense, one word (lexical item) is replaced by another; here it is one grammatical category that is replaced by another.
If we use the noun mover, “one who moves”, as when are the movers coming to shift the furniture, mover is indeed an entity; but it is an entity that is defined by a process — it does not embody the semantic feature of “process”. There is no semantic junction going on here.
Writing creates conditions in which in which knowledge can be recorded and transmitted, and hence systematically extended as new experience accrues; it provided the soil in which new ways of meaning could germinate and flourish. But there is another feature of writing which gives it its special power. Whereas speech is transitory and in flux, writing is permanent and stable; and this serves both as metaphor and as model for the grammar of written language: its own mode of being is the model for the meanings it construes. In the commonsense world of doing and happening, which is created, and ongoingly maintained, by the spoken language, the unit of organisation is the clause, which construes experience in terms of movement and change. But in the written language the organising unit becomes the noun, or rather the nominal group, which construes experience in terms of taxonomies of things. And things are better to think with; they stay where they are. So the written language makes the world look like writing itself: something that is stable, observable, and made up of clearly defined parts.
Technology is based on things: complex things, whose parts are measured and consolidated into wholes. Grammatically, these things are construed as nouns and organised into taxonomies, on the principle of meronymy. Measuring and taxonomising are steps toward scientific theory; a theory is a designed construction of meanings (a piece of semiotic technology!) in which the grammar is being used to construe more elaborate and more abstract models of experience: cosmologies, geometries, theories of the socio-political and moral order. For the first two, at least, you need to theorise about generalised processes and qualities: [how] big things are, how fast and in what directions they move, how they change from one state to another; so the grammar turns these processes and qualities into pseudo-things, virtual objects like length, motion, speed, distance, proportion. To do this the grammar uses the resources of transcategorising, which is part of its architecture: it makes verbs and adjectives into nouns, the category which construes phenomena that can be measured, and that are stable and persist through time. Transcategorising is a syntactic operation; it may use formal marking, morphological and phonological, but there may be no formal variation at all.
Language creates a metaphor for life, a semiotic universe, or “universe of meanings”, that is the analogue of the material universe in which we exists as physical beings. But the universe of meaning created by written language is one that can be frozen or suspended in time, and so can be reflected on and examined in relative tranquility.
The grammar, in its ideational function, is a theory of human experience. And a very effective theory it is, because it has evolved along with ourselves, in what is now recognised to have been the co-evolution of language and the human brain. Constructing our model of reality along these particular lines has proved highly beneficial to our survival as a species on the planet. […] But this is how the grammar — the “content plane”, the lexicogrammar with the semantics — has evolved: it is the theory in terms of which we interpret and interact with our environment.
Within the configuration we can recognise one part which is the nucleus of the figure; this consists of the process itself plus the one participant that is essential to it as the medium through which the process is actualised […] . This complex of process plus medium is what the grammar theorises as being the cornerstone of the phenomenal world.
The kinds of process distinguished by the grammar, in the most general terms, are doing and happening, sensing and saying, being and having; and the rôles played by the participants will vary according to the process type: the doer, the “done-to”, the senser, the “be-er” and so on.
In it’s ideational guise, the grammar is making sense out of the diversity of human experience by construing it into discrete quanta, which we call “figures”. Each figure is in turn construed as a configuration of elements, which are of a small number of different types. If we take English as our exemplar (but English is very typical in this respect), the figure is made up of a process of some kind, a small number of entities playing particular parts in that process, and perhaps one or two circumstantial elements surrounding it.
This blending [of the ideational and the interpersonal into a lexicogrammar] entailed a third component, that we call the textual, whereby the meanings are organised into discourse in such a way that each element in this experiential-interpersonal complex (each clause, since that is the key grammatical unit where most of the blending takes place) makes sense with its surroundings, both its material environment of what is going on around and its semiotic environment of other clauses that have gone before.
But the real genius of the semogenic spirit was to blend the ideational and the interpersonal into a single semiotic mode, and integrated form of order that we call a grammar — or more accurately a lexicogrammar, since it includes the lexical items, the words. Meaning evolved as a complex act having both these components intertwined.
Language evolved, simultaneously with this, as the construal of human experience; this is its ideational metafunction, including the strictly experiential part, construing the world of doings and happenings and the creatures and things that take part in them, and the more abstract logical part where these happenings are brought into relation one with another, relations of time and cause and so on.
Language evolved as the enactment of human relationships: that is what we call the interpersonal metafunction, ranging from the expression of personal feelings, wants and concerns to the complex interactions with other people that create and maintain the social bond.
When we are observing and investigating language, or any other semiotic system, our vision is essentially trinocular. We observe the phenomenon we want to explore — say, the lexicogrammar of language — from three points of vantage. We observe it from above, in terms of its function in various contexts. We observe it from below, in terms of its various modes of expression. And thirdly, we observe it from its own level: from within, or from round about, according to whether we are focussing on the whole or some of its parts.
When we look at it “from below”, in terms of its mode of expression, the complementarity is very obvious: speech happens, as ongoing transitory disturbances in the air, that we recognise as sound waves; writing exists, as simultaneous and relatively permanent visible marks, on stone or metal or vegetable matter processed into paper. It is only in the last few decades that these properties have come to be mixed together, so that we can now “capture” spoken language on tape, and “scroll” written language up (but also down) the computer screen. We don’t yet know what are going to be the longer-term consequences of this interpenetration of these two modes of expression, which were previously much more distinct. But changing pressures from below — and also those from above — are bound to have some significant effects.
Writing is, as I said, parasitic on spoken language; it could not have come into existence except as a surrogate of speech. But it is not, and never has been, just the same thing in a new guise. Writing is not just spoken language written down, unlike the visual system of deaf sign (“sign language”), which is truly a variant of spoken language and shares the functions and fluidities of speech. […] This is to look at writing “from above”, in terms of its meaning and its function in human cultures.
There is serial time reference to past / present / future, beginning with deictic time [i.e. time relative to now] and moving on recursively from there; this is fully grammaticalised as the tense system in the verbal group, which operates in partial concord with lexical realisations of the same temporal categories. That is the underlying potential, in terms of which actual instances are construed by speaker and listener.
But the tense system of English is organised on this serial principle: each choice of past, present or future may serve as a point of reference for a further move into past, present or future, and this can happen four or five times over. There is no requirement that each step should be made explicit; the speaker can move in at any point, and verbs with up to three tense choices are commonly used as dialogic openings, for example
- I’ve been going to ask you: … future in past in present
“the present situation is that in the past I was contemplating the future”.
To revisit my earlier analogy of climate and weather: the power of weather to influence our daily lives, through storms and floods and droughts and all the rest, derives from the fact that it is the instantiation of something we call “climate” — because it is climate that has shaped our evolution and so determines the effect on us, and indeed on all of nature, of all the fluctuating processes and forces that we call “weather”. In the same way the power of the text resides in the system, because it is the system that determines the meaning and the significance of the ongoing choices made by writers and speakers. It is a mistake to restrict our angle of vision to just one perspective or the other, or to treat the discourse analyst and grammarian as if they inhabited two different realms of intellectual being.
Thanks to these two metafunctions, in the modern “globalised” world of corporate and state capitalism it is language that maintains and reinforces the political and economic power structures in which we live and move. Discourse analysts often refer to this phenomenon as “the language of power”. But there can only be a language of power because of the power of language; and the power of language depends, in turn, on the complementarity of system and text.
Language has an almost unlimited capacity for construing our experience of reality — not surprising, because that is one of the two major functions, or “metafunctions”, in which it evolved. It sets up a virtual universe of meaning as interface between ourselves and the external world. The other major function was that of enacting our social identities, managing the complex interpersonal and institutional relationships within which human beings, and human cultures, have evolved.
It follows from these two properties that the description of any one instance is its relationship to other instances: describing and relating are one operation not two. Each instance has meaning by virtue of what it might have been (but was not).
Agnation means that the outputs of different passes through the same network will be related; and the distance between them can be measured, by the number and location of the features that they share — how much their “selection expressions” have in common.
Proportionality means that the terms in the system stand in a constant relationship to one another; their significance will vary according to the context, but (for example) hats is to hat as hairs is to hair as silk is to silks, even though hats are more than hat, hairs are less than hair, and silks are kinds of silk.
Seen from the system end, instantiation means making a pass, or passes, through the network, selecting a systemic feature at each choice point. The key properties, for understanding this as a meaning-making operation, are proportionality and agnation.
One problem that has sometimes been raised in this connection is that the number of options seems too vast. […] But (as Wimsatt pointed out, criticising Chomsky’s notion of the innateness of grammar — what he referred to as “generative entrenchment” and the “developmental lock”), what is relevant is the number of choice points; […] The system network is not a modelling of neural processes — it is an analytical tool for the grammarian. But there is nothing improbable in the range of possibilities that such networks are able to represent.
The network is a theory of the system — that is, of the linguistic system, at any one stratum, as a whole. It is a paradigmatic theory, because the concept of system itself is paradigmatic. […] Any theory of possibilities is essentially paradigmatic. It is by networking the system that we show, not just how meaning is made, but how it is possible for meaning to be made. The system networks of the grammar are an attempt to state the possibilities of the grammar as a whole, its total potential for construing meaning in wording.
The system is the potential that informs and gives value to the text. Each instance minutely perturbs the probabilities of the system. Any part of the system may remain stable over long periods of time; but the system as a whole is metastable: it persists by continually evolving within its overall eco-social environment.
… Bernstein’s concept of “code”, which he defined as sociolinguistic coding orientation […] with its opposition of “elaborated / restricted”, was the basic mechanism of cultural transmission: it was the different semiotic practices, or “meaning styles”, of different social classes that was responsible for transmitting social class distinctions across the generations.
Whereas dialect variation was variation according to the user, register variation was variation according to the use. Like dialect, register was the name of a kind of variation; so if we talk of “a register”, this is again analogous to “a dialect”, in the sense that each refers to a clustering of features that typically go together. In the case of register, these will be explained in terms of the view from above — the context of situation [i.e. context as instance] and the context of culture [i.e. context as system]. In other words, a pattern of regularities in this middle range of generality (pertaining to less than the language but more than the individual text) is most clearly observed from the “system” position, where it will appear as a motivated resetting of the global probabilities of the language.
System and instance are the two observational poles: observers, we may position ourselves up close, as instance observers, or else at a distance, as system observers. The two vantage points raise different questions about language. But the phenomena we are trying to explain may be just those whose regularities are found in some intermediate region along the instantiation cline, so that it is not all obvious which position we should be observing from. … [Functional variation] appears either instantially in the form of “text types” or systemically as variation in “register”. If we find systematic variation in the meanings selected in a number of specimens of discourse, we might group together those instances that are alike in certain respects, in their grammar or in their text structure, and recognise a set of text types. But if want to explain such variation, we shift our stance to that of the system observer and recognise specific sub-systems [i.e. registers] that are motivated “from above” — from the context, associated with some culturally defined forms of social practice.
Over and above this feature of comprehensiveness, the metaphoric code has other features which, while they might be mildly dysfunctional in a scientific context, can be exploited to some effect when it is transported into a bureaucratic setting. It can be oblique, impersonal and ambiguous: “oblique” because it stands at several removes from experience; “impersonal” because agents and other participants are often left out; “ambiguous” because the signals of syntactic relations among elements are usually absent.
… metaphoric variety is not, in fact, some kind of specialised sub-system. Rather, it is an alternative system, a parallel universe of discourse which offers — in fact imposes — its own account of any portion of reality. In other words, it can be brought into play in any context of situation.
It has to be stressed that these metaphoric “rewordings” are not, in fact, new ways of saying old things (although it can be made to look as if they are). They are not so much “rewordings” as “remeanings”, new ways of semanticising human experience.
The effect of the metaphoric processes, now operating in syndromes that permeated the entire text, was to create a new virtual reality in which phenomena of all kinds — not only entities but also processes, qualities, circumstances and logical relations — could be classified into taxonomies, measured, and used to reason with; and each new step in the argument could become the given for a further move. It was as if the grammar was holding the world still, in its place — freezeframing it, so to speak — as it was being observed, quantified, and theorised about. Where the grammar of daily life, with its commonsense theory of experience based on the clause, presented a flux of doings and happenings and the people and things that take part in them, the new grammar of science, based on the nominal group, stabilised the flux and imposed order on the phenomenal world.
Two aspects of a language are involved: (1) the metaphoric potential, realigning the relations between the semantics and the lexicogrammar (“de- and re-coupling”); (2) the transcategorising potential, moving lexicalised elements across syntactic classes. The first of these is the essential operation; the second is the mechanism by which it is achieved.
The nominalisations functioning as technical terms are those which have become systemic; they can no longer be “unpacked” (that is, replaced by a more congruent form). We can say — using a lexical metaphor — that the metaphor is “dead”: a technical term is, essentially, a dead grammatical metaphor. The ones functioning to build up the argument remain instantial; they can readily be unpacked and replaced by an agnate congruent wording.
[Grammatical metaphor] is functional [in theory-building] in two distinct though complementary ways.
- On the one hand, it creates technicality. The virtual entities that come into existence through semantic junction embody a large amount of technical knowledge; and these technical terms can be organised into technical taxonomies thanks to the constructional resources of the nominal group.
- On the other hand, it creates rationality. In the same way, by “packaging” a lot of previous information in the text, the nominalisation makes it possible to build up chains or sequences of logical argument; these are construed by the text-forming resources of the grammar (in English, the organisation of the clause into Theme and Rheme, and of the information unit into Given and New.)
A virtual entity such as heat resistance is construed logogenetically: it is built up in the course of the text — which may be a single text or, more probably, the macrotext of some scientific subdiscipline. (Virtual processes, on the other hand, like cause and inhibit, tend to be general across all registers of learned discourse.) Such an entity is quite likely to become systemic: it enters the system and becomes a “technical term”. Other nominalisations may remain purely instantial: they function at that moment in the text, but are created each time out of the general resources of the grammar.
All metaphoric processes take place in time. But there is more than one dimension of time involved. There is phylogenetic time: the history of the linguistic system. There is logogenetic time: the history of the text. There is also a third time dimension: ontogenetic time, the history of the individual, as learner and user of language.
The effect of this semantic junction is to create virtual phenomena which exist on the semiotic plane. Thus motion and heat are virtual entities; cause and follow (“come after in time”) are virtual processes; while heat resistance is a virtual class of a virtual entity resistance. Such virtual phenomena are critical for the construction of theory;
By these and other such metaphoric processes, new meanings are created at the intersection of the two categories involved. A “semantic junction” takes place, and this construes new and complex semiotic entities having the features of both. For example, motion is a junction of “process”, which is the category meaning of a verb move, and “entity”, which is the category meaning of a noun, as in motion. Likewise, heat is both entity, because it is a noun, and quality, because the congruent form is hot which is adjective. The verb cause is a junction of process, because it is a verb, and logical-semantic relation, because the congruent form is so which is a conjunction.
Almost every instance of grammatical metaphor involves a syndrome of related features. There are many different patterns of co-occurrence, but most involve one or more of the following three.
- Processes and qualities, congruently realised as verb and adjective, get nominalised (transformed into nouns): move becomes motion, (be) hot becomes heat.
- Logical-semantic relations, like cause and time, congruently realised as conjunctions, get verbalised (transformed into verbs): so becomes causes, then becomes follows.
- Various clausal configurations are transformed into nominal groups, typically with structure Classifier + Thing: resists (the effects of) heat becomes heat resistance, replacing assets becomes asset replacement.
- metaphor as syndrome,
- metaphor as semantic junction,
- metaphor as temporal process,
- metaphor as theory-building.
Grammatical metaphor is that type of metaphoric process in which the moving parts […] are not lexical items but grammatical categories. It is the process whereby the congruent form […] is transformed into its metaphorical agnate […] . This is perhaps the single most important source of the power that language has of reconstruing the reality that it has previously put in place.
But given that “system” is simply the name given to the potential that is instantiated in text, when we talk of the system changing what we mean is that the text potential has undergone a shift of some kind or other. This may be quantitative change, a shift in the probabilities of the terms in some grammatical system … ; or it may be qualitative change, as happens when a term disappears altogether … . Quantitative changes may stabilise; or they may move on to become qualitative … .
For the discourse analyst, the main problem has been the lack of any coherent account of the semantic system. A text is a construction of meaning; and while the meaning potential of a language is structured and powered by the lexicogrammar, it is the multidimensional organisation of semantic space that defines the overall topology within which speakers and writers are operating.
For the grammarian (and I should say, by the way, that by “the grammarian” here I understand one who works in lexicogrammar and semantics: the systems thinker on the content plane), the problem has been one that is very simple to state: namely lack of data. The grammarian has never had access to the data that are needed for construing an adequate theory.
… whichever of these rôles we are adopting, we need to observe from both ends. The grammarian, however system-oriented he may be, has to monitor instances of discourse; the discourse analyst, however text-oriented, has to keep an eye on the overall potential. The complementarity means that, unless you shift your angle, you will distort the picture: you cannot know all that is going on if you keep to just one observational perspective.
It is particularly in accounting for different kinds of variation in language — dialect, register and genre, Bernstein’s “code” — that the complementarity becomes important for our understanding; and especially in overcoming those unfortunate disjunctions that we have come to live with, that between linguistics and pragmatics at one level, and that between theory of grammar and theory of discourse at another.
The system observer is viewing language from a greater distance in space and time. Any phenomenon in language can be observed from either end, in its environment within the system or within the text; each stance will afford certain insights — but the phenomenon will look different according to which we choose.
In […] grammar and lexis, […] the complementarity is one of focus, based on the scale, or vector, of delicacy. System and text, on the other hand, form a complementarity of angle, based on the vector of instantiation.
In the most general sense, complementarity is a special form of complexity; one can think of it perhaps as the management of contradiction. … I am using it here as a way of bringing together what are in fact three different types of complexity that we find in language, but which are all based on some kind of contradiction.
In other words, system and text form a complementarity, one that is defined by the vector of instantiation. … What I am here calling system and text are two complementary positions of the observer, two observational perspectives on the phenomenon — in this case, on the phenomenon of language. Thus “text” is the instantiation of the system; or, alternatively, “system” is text potential.
The system and the text are not two different orders of reality … . There can only be one set of phenomena here, not two. But since there are two possible angles from which to approach and observe them, the same question of point of view arises [as with climate and weather]. Consider the phenomenon of functional variation in language. If we look at this from the “instance” end, we will find in our corpus certain groups of texts that are alike in certain respects; we will be able to recognise something that we call a “text type”. If we look at these same phenomena from the “system” end, we will see this as a sub-system, a recognisable alignment of the meaning-making resources of the system; this is what we refer to as a “register”. Either we see a recurrent pattern of linguistic weather, or we see a definable motif within the linguistic climate. Both of these are possible points of view; but they engender rather different modes of explanation.
Like all analogies, that between climate and language is oblique and partial. It is an abstract tool for thinking with, not in any sense a strict proportion. Semiotic systems are not like physical systems. For one thing, an instance of a semiotic system carries value. Instances of physical systems do not. You may prefer one kind of weather to another, but that has no relevance whatsoever to the significance of an instance of that kind of weather to another in relation to the theory of climate. Such an instance is simply to be observed, measured and taken account of like any other. But a text has its own differential value. The value is not something fixed and determinate, in most cases; if it is a recorded text, its value may vary at different times, in different places, or under different conditions.
So the analogy whereby language is to text as climate is to weather is useful to think with — up to a point. It reminds us that there are not two different things at issue here, but only one. What we call “climate”, and what we call “weather”, are the same phenomenon seen from different angles, or different moments of time. So it is with “language” and “text”. But in the case of language, so much misunderstanding has been caused by counterposing these two terms, with language and text being treated as if they were different orders of reality, that I shall not make use of these terms in opposition. Instead I shall talk of “text” and “system”, these being two aspects, or guises, of the single phenomenon “language”: thus, language as system, and language as text. Here I am borrowing “system” from its place in the generalised opposition between system and instance.
In the same — or at least an analogous — sense [as climate being a theory of the weather], language is a theory of the text. Again, it may be a low-level commonsense theory, as when we comment on a particular person’s language, or on the language of advertisers or of politicians. … Or it may be a designed scientific theory, such as we find in learned articles on the grammar or phonology of a given language, or of several languages or even language in general. When this happens we turn the theory itself into a virtual entity and call it “linguistics”, or, in the case of the weather, “climatology”.
I do make a distinction between these two; but it is a difference in point of view, between different angles of vision on the phenomena, not in the phenomena themselves. So we can use either to define the other: “discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.
[…] you can, as expected, network through the grammar into the lexis; but what you end up with are not lexical items but lexical features. The lexical item will appear, but it will appear as a conjunct realisation of a number of these terminal features. The features are thus components of the lexical items, but the description differs from a usual componential analysis in two important respects. In the first place, the components are systemic: they are organised in sets of systemic options; and in the second place, more significantly, they are derived by ordered steps in delicacy all the way from the primary grammatical categories.
Each feature (that is, each term in each system) is entered in the network together with its realisation, the contribution it makes to the shape of the final output. In the most general (least delicate) systems, this contribution is typically structural: some change in the functional configuration, like adding new elements or putting them in a certain order. But some items of wording appear as realisations in the network almost from the start: these are the function words of English like the and of and it and and and to. As you move over towards the right, the systems become less general; and more and more of the features get to be lexicalised. First there will be middle order items, those functioning somewhere in between the grammatical and lexical poles: like pronouns, and certain types of conjunction and of adverb; then particular classes of verbs, of adjectives or of nouns.
The vertical axis of the network is unordered; systems are arranged so as to make the two-dimensional representation of the wiring as simple as possible. But the horizontal axis is ordered from left to right on a scale of delicacy, or refinement in detail (referred to in computational grammars as “granularity”). Here the ordering is determined by the interrelations among the various systems, irrespective of how their terms are realised in structure. This is a fundamental consideration: one of the reasons for making the underlying representation paradigmatic was in order to free it from constraints of structure, so that every feature could be located according to its relationship with other features. In other words, describing something, and relating it to everything else (to its agnates), which in a description based on structure are two distinct operations, in a systemic grammar are one and the same operation. Each feature is described by being located in its paradigmatic context.
In a systemic grammar, the most abstract representation takes the form of a system network, modelling the sets of options that the grammar makes available, and the interrelation between one set of options and another: whether they are simultaneous or dependent. The network is a theory of what the speaker can do: what he can mean, at the semantic stratum; what he can say, or “word”, at the stratum of lexicogrammar; what he can say, or “sound”, at the strata of phonology and phonetics. It is a more truly generative grammar, as distinct from the earlier Chomskyan kind of generative grammar which, as Peter Wexler once remarked, should really be called a “contraceptive grammar” since it was all about the enforcement of constraint.
Polarity can be taken as the quintessential example of a grammatical system; it is involved in everything we say — everything that language can turn into meaning. It has a place in all metafunctions — in a sense it is pre-metafunctional; this is why it can be ambivalent, if realised on its own (as yes or no), and can be lexicalised in both ideational and interpersonal combinations (eg allow / forbid; nice / nasty). It provides a model of how meaning gets grammaticalised: no doubt it was central to the evolution of language in the species, though that we can never know; it is the first opposition to appear in the development of language in infancy, in the context of “I want / I don’t want” signalled by sound or gesture.
In principle any meaning can be construed in either perspective. Languages vary, of course, as regards which semantic categories they construe grammatically and which lexically, as well in how the distinction is formally expressed; and any given feature may turn up at different locations along the cline.
Thus in the interpersonal domain, the organisation of meaning into the two regions, the lexical and the grammatical, is less polarised; there is not such a clear demarcation between the general and the particular in the management of human relationships. The two contrasting perspectives are still distinct; but it becomes more apparent that the differences between them is one of depth of focus, not one of discontinuity in the phenomena themselves.
Interpersonally, the same two perspectives come into play. Some interpersonal meanings are highly generalised, like the enactment of dialogic rôles (speech function); Hasan (1992) and Hasan & Cloran (1990) present semantic networks for interpersonal systems of speech function (questions and commands) showing their realisations in the grammar.
With options in the way something is evaluated (“I approve / I disapprove”) or contended (“I agree / I disagree”), the borderline between grammar and lexis is shaded over; systems of appraisal, as described by Martin & White (2005), represent more delicate (more highly differentiated options within the general region of evaluation.
There are then mixed systems where the two perspectives intersect; for example systems of modality, in which the various degrees of probability and usuality have multiple realisations, including those where items which elsewhere function lexically are organised into systemic sets — wordings like certainly, perhaps, I think, I’m convinced and many others.
So the lexicogrammar adopts two contrasting perspectives for construing all this complexity. The one is specific and open-ended; hence flexible, but low in information: this the lexical perspective, good for seeing phenomena as particular. The other is general and systemic: hence high in information, but creating closure: this is the grammatical perspective, good for seeing phenomena as generality. The two perspectives are complementary; any phenomenon can be looked at in terms of either, but they will present two different images of the whole.
Ideationally, the lexicogrammar sorts out the complex world of our surroundings, including the part that consists of our own bodies, our own “selves”. But the things that surround us, and impinge on us, are immense varied and complex. There are particular things; these have to be sorted into classes, by selecting, out of the innumerable ways in which one thing can be like one another, those analogies that seem to be significant. The classes, in turn, are sorted into classes of classes, or taxonomies. But the critical factor in the way things impinge upon us is that of change. As well as things, there are happenings, which give the things their value; the particular happenings also have to be sorted into their classes, but in addition to this they have to be located in the matrix of space and time. At the same time, however, both things and happenings display certain very general features, properties which can be abstracted out of their particulars and construed as features of whole classes of phenomena, or even of all. All happenings have several “moments” in time; all things have certain qualities or quantities; and so on.
Survival depends on both aspects of our existence. Language has to be both a way of thinking, of construing the world, and a way of doing, of acting on and interacting with the people in it. This is in fact another complementarity; language acts out this complementarity, at a more abstract level, by transforming both thinking and doing into meaning. It is this that has shaped the evolution of lexicogrammar.
Every clause in every kind of discourse combines an ideational and an interpersonal strand of meaning. But weaving these two together is an extremely complicated task; and in managing all this complexity, language evolved a third metafunctional component, by which it is enabled to organise itself in the form of discourse. Discourse is what linguists perceive as text; so we call this the textual metafunction. This is what enables a language to function meaningfully in all its multifarious contexts.
But the principle is usually formulated in terms of just one aspect of this relationship, the ideational: the way our language functions to construe our own experience of the world. Yet the human condition is a social one, and our environment is not just ecological — it is eco-social; so our language functions also interpersonally. And here it is performing a more active rôle: it is not just construing but enacting our relationships with our fellow creatures. In terms of the classical model deriving from Plato, there is the “first–&–second person” component of language, that which is organised around the interaction of “you” and “me”, as well as the “third person” component of language, that which is organised around the construal of others, of “him, her, it, them”. These two metafunctional components are at the foundation of every human language, and both evolved under the same conditions. Our social interactions increased in complexity just as did our relations with all aspects of the environment. Neither component can be instantiated without the other.
I have always held the view that language is a probabilistic system. Word frequency is the manifestation of probability in the lexicogrammar — or rather, of one particular aspect of it. Another, more powerful aspect of lexicogrammatical probability is the relative probability of the terms in a grammatical system. A grammatical system, such as polarity, or mood, or tense, is a small set of contrasting options with a defined condition of entry — but it is more than that: it is a set of options each having a certain measure of probability.
A grammar is an evolved system, and evolved systems readily admit complementarity; a grammatics is a designed system, and designed systems tend to be hostile to it (it’s too messy). Twentieth century linguistics has been a monument to either/or-ism; which is one reason perhaps why we still do not understand too well how natural semiotic systems work.
Time is both linear and aspectual (tense and aspect)Process is both extension and causation (transitive and ergative)Matter is both discrete and concrete (count and mass)Causality is both a relation between processes and a single complex process (clause nexus and clause)
Complementarity is what turns “either / or” into “both + and”. …
And one thing is obvious: grammar has no place for “either/or-ism”; it always turns “either / or” into “both + and” …
Then think of agency: how it is that processes are brought about. Either I do something, which may or may not impact on some other entity (I as Actor; plus or minus a Goal); or I do something, which may or may not be caused by some other entity (I as Medium; plus or minus an Agent). Whichever way we choose to model these, whether as extension (“transitive”) or as causation (“ergative”), we cannot know all about how processes with two participants take place.
The grammar of every language is (in one of its metafunctions, the ideational) a construal of human experience: it constructs our “reality” by transforming our experiences into meanings. And in doing this, the grammar often has to choose: to choose either one way of seeing things, or the other. For example, think of time. Either time is a linear progression, out of future through present into past; or else it is a translation from the virtual into the actual. It can’t be both. We may choose to model it (and note here that I am talking about our grammar — not our theory of grammar, our “grammatics”; so we means the speakers of the language, not the linguists) … so let us say our language may choose to model it either as tense, or as aspect;
The point to be made is that one aspect of the complementarity of spoken and written language lies in their different ways of achieving and managing complexity. The complexity of written language resides in its density: the way it packages its meanings into highly condensed, mainly noun-based structures which combine into rather simple clausal configurations. The complexity of spoken language resides in its intricacy: the way it knots together long strands of quite sparsely loaded clauses into intricate patterns of logical-semantic relationships. So the complementarity of speaking and writing is not simply that of their different modes of being and of happening, but rather in the different strategies for the organisation of meaning — as “spoken language” and “written language” — that have evolved to match, and to exploit, these two different modes of existence.
Observed from close up, language appears in the guise of text, instances of spoken or written discourse that can be perceived by the senses — that can be heard or seen. Observed from a distance, language appears as a potential, an open ended network of possibilities with certain statistical properties and having certain kinds of interrelationship with its eco-social environment. The text is a process of selecting, and a product of selection, from within this overall potential.
I feel it is important to refer to the complementarity in these terms, “language as system” and “language as text”, in order to stress that these are two aspects of one single phenomenon — not two different phenomena, as is implied if you use a simple duality like “language and text”, or “langue and parole”. System and text are one and the same phenomenon; the system is simply the potential that is instantiated in every moment of discourse.
The boundaries of any grammatical category are likely to be fuzzy […] — such indeterminacy is a general property of the grammar. The grammarian attempts to define each category as accurately as possible, looking at it from three different angles: its systemic environment (contrast with other term or terms in the system, and the relationship of that system to other systems); its meaning (proportionality in semantic terms), and its form. In other words, the grammarian adopts a “trinocular” perspective on the stratal hierarchy so that every category is viewed “from round about”, “from above” and “from below”. And since the views from these different angles often conflict, assigning instances to a particular category involves some degree of compromise, where criteria will depend on the purposes of the description.
This is the “system” in the sense in which it was formulated and defined by JR Firth (Firth 1957a,b); the system is the paradigmatic relation that “gives value to” the elements of syntagmatic structure. […] It is the system that defines the set of options from which any feature derives its value. […] What characterises the system is the regular proportionality between its terms. The system is closed, so that its terms are mutually defining […]
It seemed to me that the lexis and the grammar were complementary, at least in their reality-construing, ideational function. In principle, any phenomenon of human experience could be construed either way: either lexically, as specific and open-ended, or grammatically, as generalised and closed; and hence, if some phenomenon showed a high degree of complexity, it might be construed in both ways at once.
I had always been interested in the ways in which the “grammars” of natural languages — that is, the lexicogrammatical resources as a whole — parcelled out the immense task of representing human experience. I referred to this as construing, with construe meaning “construct semiotically, transform into meaning”; so the task of transforming experience into meaning.
A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.
What the metaphorical interpretation does is to suggest how an instance in the text may be referred to the system of language as a whole. It is therefore an important link in the total chain of explanations whereby we relate the text to the system.
In the most general terms, the purpose of analysis a text is to explain the impact that it makes: why it means what it does, and why it gives the particular impression that it does.
The important point to make is that a piece of wording that is metaphorical has as it were an additional dimension of meaning: it ‘means’ both metaphorically and congruently. … however far one may choose to go in unpacking ideational metaphor, it is important also to analyse each instance as it is.
This kind of nominalising metaphor probably evolved first in scientific and technical registers, where it played a dual rôle: it made it possible on the one hand to construct hierarchies of technical terms, and on the other hand to develop an argument step by step, using complex passages ‘packaged’ in nominal form as Themes. It has gradually worked its way through into most other varieties of adult discourse, in much of which, however, it loses its original raison d’être and tends to become merely a mark of prestige and power.
Nominalising is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. By this device, processes (congruently worded as verbs) and properties (congruently worded as adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as nouns; instead of functioning in the clause, as Process or Attribute, they function as Thing in the nominal group. … What the happens to the original ‘things’? They get displaced by the metaphoric ones, and so are reduced to modifying these…
In spoken language, the ideational content is loosely strung out, but in clausal patterns that can become highly intricate in movement: the complexity is dynamic — we might think of it in choreographic terms. In written language, the clausal patterns are typically simple; but the ideational content is densely packed in nominal constructions: here the complexity is more static — perhaps crystalline.
To measure lexical density, simply divide the number of lexical items by the number of ranking clauses.
Typically, written language becomes complex by being lexically dense: it packs a large number of lexical items into each clause; whereas spoken language becomes complex by being grammatically intricate: it builds up elaborate clause complexes out of parataxis and hypotaxis.
When the realisation of a whole figure is downgraded through metaphor from clause to nominal group, its elements will of course also be downgraded: the process is nominalised and serves as Thing… ; the other elements of the figure are realised either as downranked groups/phrases serving as Qualifier or Deictic… or, by a further step, as words serving as Classifier, Epithet or Post-Deictic.
The incongruent realisation of a figure may retain the clause as the domain of realisation, but downgrade all of the figure as a metaphorical nominal group, creating a new Process.
The incongruent realisation of a figure may retain the clause as the domain of realisation, but downgrade … part of the figure as a metaphorical nominal group.
The incongruent realisation of the figure may downgrade the domain from clause to group/phrase. Grammatically, this is only possible in an environment of rankshift, as when the congruent clause or metaphorical group/phrase serves as the Head or Postmodifier of a nominal group.
With expansion, one figure of a sequence may be realised congruently by a clause, while the other is realised incongruently as a prepositional phrase serving as a circumstantial element within that clause; here the relator of the sequence is realised as the minor Process of the phrase. The relator and the minor Process are matched in terms of subtype of expansion.
With projection, the projecting figure may be realised congruently as a ‘verbal’ or ‘mental’ clause, while the projected figure is realised incongruently as the Range — the Verbiage or the Phenomenon.
With expansion, both figures of a sequence may be realised incongruently as Token and Value in a ‘circumstantial relational’ clause; here the relator of the sequence is realised, also incongruently, as the Process element in the clause. The expansion type of the relator is matched by the nature of the circumstantial process. … Alternatively, the ‘circumstantial relational’ clause is ‘attributive’ rather than ‘identifying’, with expanding figure as Attribute and the expanded one as Carrier.
Relations of internal cause — cause in the sense of ‘x so I think/say y’ — are construed metaphorically by verbs of proving such as prove, show, demonstrate, argue, suggest, indicate, imply in ‘intensive identifying relational’ clauses.
With expansion, both figures of the sequence may be realised incongruently as Token and Value in an ‘intensive relational’ clause; but the relator is nominalised as the Thing of the nominal group serving as Value, and the expanding figure is embedded as a Qualifier. The nominalised relator is a noun of expansion such as time, place, cause, result, reason.
With projection, the projected figure may be realised metaphorically as an embedded ‘fact’ clause serving as Token.
With expansion, the relator in the sequence may be realised incongruently as a noun serving as the Head or Thing of the nominal group and the figure(s) being related as Modifier.
With projection, the projecting figure in a sequence may be realised incongruently as a noun of projection serving as the Head/Thing of a nominal group and the projected figure as a downranked clause serving as Qualifier.
There is always a domino effect: as the realisational domain of the sequence is downgraded, so are the realisational domains of its component parts. At least one of the figures is, in turn, realised metaphorically as a ranking group or phrase, and elements within figures are realised either by downranked groups or phrases or by words.
These successive steps in downgrading are possible because both projection and expansion are motifs that are manifested throughout the grammatical system: a sequence of projection can thus be realised not only by the manifestation of projection in the clause nexus, but also by its manifestation in the clause or the group/phrase. The same principle applies to expansion.
… the general tendency for ideational metaphor is to ‘downgrade’ the domain of grammatical realisation of a semantic sequence, figure or element — from clause nexus to clause, from clause to group/phrase, and even from group or phrase to word. Such downgrading affects both the unit whose domain of realisation is downgraded, and the units of which it is composed: the downgrading proceeds down the rank scale by a kind of ‘domino effect’.
The general tendency is for interpersonal metaphor to ‘upgrade’ the domain of grammatical realisation; for example, while the congruent realisation of modality is a group serving in the clause, the metaphorical realisation is a clause that projects or embeds the clause to which a modal value is assigned. In this way, interpersonal metaphor tends to expand interpersonal systems by adding explicit variants — that is, variants where the subjective or objective orientation is made explicit.
… grammatical metaphor of the ideational kind is primarily a strategy enabling us to transform our experience of the world: the model of experience construed in the congruent mode is reconstrued in the metaphorical mode, creating a model that is further removed from our everyday experience — but which has made modern science possible.
… when a figure is realised metaphorically by a group or phrase, it is deprived of the interpersonal status of a proposition or proposal, making it inarguable. It is thus presented as something already established; and any modifications, including interpersonal evaluative ones, have to be taken for granted.
When a sequence is realised metaphorically by a clause, it is given the interpersonal status of a proposition or proposal, making it arguable. … a ‘propositionalised’ sequence can be modalised, doubted, argued and negotiated interpersonally in numerous other ways.
… a figure, realised metaphorically by a nominal group rather than congruently as a clause, gains access to the textual systems of the nominal group — most significantly, the system of determination. This means it can be treated textually as a discourse referent. It is marked either as ‘non-specific’ or as ‘specific’, in which case the identity is presented as recoverable to the addressee.
When a sequence is realised metaphorically by a clause, this means not only that it is mapped onto the transitivity patterns of the clause but also that it falls within the domain of Theme + Rheme organisation of the clause and also, by extension, that of the Given + New organisation of the information unit. … There is thus a gain in textual meaning in the shift from the congruent mode of realisation to the metaphoric mode.
… when a sequence is realised by a clause rather than by a clause nexus, it will be structured textually into Theme + Rheme and, since a clause is an information unit in the unmarked case, also into Given + New. This means that the figures that make up the sequence can be given thematic or newsworthy status.
The textual and interpersonal effects of ideational metaphor are due to the fact the realignment of ideational patterns […] also means that there is a realignment of the textual and interpersonal environments in which ideational systems operate.
Within the ideational metafunction, the general effect of this realignment in the semantic system is a shift from the logical to the experiential — an experientialisation of experience. Thus logical sequences of figures are reconstrued as experiential configurations of elements.
… the tactic patterns of clause complexing (with the distinction between paratactic interdependency and hypotactic dependency) are not available to sequences that are realised metaphorically as clauses, and the configurational patterns of participant rôles are lost or obscured when figures are realised as groups or phrases.
… the metaphorical mode thus makes available a great deal of further ideational potential that is not accessible in the congruent mode. At the same time, the metaphorical mode also denies access to significant aspects of potential that is associated with the congruent mode: there is a loss of ideational meaning.
… the ideational metafunction is a resource for construing our experience of the world that lies around us and inside us. In the congruent mode, the grammar construes sequences (of figures), figures and elements as the basic phenomena of experience… . In the metaphorical mode, the model is enriched through combinations of these categories: in addition to the congruent categories, we now also have metaphorical combinations of categories — sequences construed as figures, figures construed as elements, and so on. These combinations open up new meaning potential.
The ‘re-mapping’ is possible because semantic motifs such as cause are manifested repeatedly in the different environments of the grammar so that each environment is a possible domain of realisation for such a motif. These motifs are of the two primary types, expansion and projection…
… grammatical metaphor within the ideational metafunction involves a ‘re-mapping’ between sequences, figures and elements in the semantics and clause nexuses, clauses and groups in the grammar. … In the metaphorical mode, the whole set of mappings seems to be shifted ‘downwards’: a sequence is realised by a clause, a figure is realised by a group, and an element is realised by a word.
Just like interpersonal metaphor, ideational metaphor introduces additional layers of meaning that are construed by the grammar as additional layers of wording.
Unlike interpersonal metaphor, the other type of grammatical metaphor, ideational metaphor, is learned later by children and is not part of the grammar of ordinary, spontaneous conversation that children meet in the home and neighbourhood; rather it is associated with the discourses of education and science, bureaucracy and the law. Children are likely to meet the ideational type of metaphor when they reach the upper levels of primary school; but its full force will only appear when they begin to grapple with the specialised discourses of subject-based secondary education.
The expansion of the interpersonal semantic system through grammatical metaphor provides speakers with additional, powerful resources for enacting social rôles and relations in the complex network of relations that make up the fabric of a community of any kind.
The interpersonal metafunction defines the environment in which children first learn the strategy of grammatical metaphor [a manifestation of a more general principle]. No doubt this is partly because interpersonal metaphors tend to make selections more explicit, as when probability is realised by a ‘mental’ clause projecting the modalised proposition (‘explicit’ orientation), and partly because the interpretation of interpersonal metaphors is often both supported and ‘tested’ immediately in the ongoing dialogic interaction.
Both interpersonal and ideational metaphors can be represented in the same way, by postulating some congruent form and then analysing the two in relation to each other.
In addition to metaphors based on ideational projection, there are other kinds of metaphors of mood as well. One prominent type involves a shift in the realisational domain of commands from ‘imperative’ to ‘indicative’ clauses. The ‘indicative’ clause can be either ‘declarative’ or ‘interrogative’; … The ‘indicative’ realisation of proposals has the effect of blurring the line between proposals directed to the addressee and propositions about how the world ought to be.
The potential for negotiation in dialogue created by metaphors of mood is directly related to the contextual variables of tenor. These are usually discussed in terms of status, formality and politeness. What they have in common is a very general sense of the social distance between the speaker and the addressee. Here interpersonal metaphor is part of a principle of interpersonal iconicity: metaphorical variants create a greater semiotic distance between meaning and wording, and this enacts a greater social distance between speaker and addressee.
… just like modality, speech function can be represented as a substantive proposition in its own right; and this proposition is a figure of sensing or saying that projects the original (i) proposal or (ii) proposition… .
On the one hand, an ‘imperative’ clause imposes an obligation; on the other hand, the imperative tag checks the addressee’s inclination to comply… .
Interpersonal projection always involves the speaker or addressee as ‘projector’… . It is always implicit unless it is made explicit through grammatical metaphor, by ‘co-opting’ ideational resources to do interpersonal service.
The metaphoric strategy is to upgrade the interpersonal assessment from group rank to clause rank — from an adverbial group or prepositional phrase serving within a simple clause to a clause serving within a clause nexus of projection.
Systemically, metaphor leads to an expansion of the meaning potential: by creating new patterns of structural realisation, it opens up new systemic domains of meaning. And it is the pressure to expand the meaning potential that in fact lies behind the development of metaphorical modes of meaning. Thus in the system of modality, the system of orientation is expanded by the addition of a systemic contrast in manifestation between ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’…
…the semantic domain of modality is extended through grammatical metaphor to include explicit indications of subjective and objective orientation: a modal proposition or proposal is realised, as if it were a projection sequence, by a nexus of two clauses, rather than by a single clause. Here the modal assessment itself is given the status of a proposition in its own right; but because the projecting clause of the nexus is metaphorical in nature, standing for an interpersonal assessment of modality, it is also, at the same time, a modal Adjunct in the clause realising the proposition/proposal. This is the general effect of grammatical metaphor: it construes additional layers of meaning and wording.
The importance of modal features in the grammar of interpersonal exchanges lie in an apparent paradox on which the entire system rests — the fact that we only say we are certain when we are not.
The explicitly subjective and explicitly objective forms of modality are all strictly speaking metaphorical, since all of them represent the modality as being the substantive proposition. Modality represents the speaker’s angle, either on the validity of the assertion or on the rights and wrongs of the proposal; in its congruent form, it is an adjunct to a proposition rather than a proposition in its own right.
This is on the fringe of the modality system. It has the different orientations of subjective (implicit only) realised by can/can’t, objective implicit by be able to, and objective explicit by it is possible (for …) to. In the last of these, the typical meaning is ‘potentiality’… . In the subjective it is closer to inclination; we could recognise a general category of ‘readiness’, having ‘inclination’ and ‘ability’ as subcategories at one end of the scale… . In any case can in this sense is untypical of the modal operators: it is the only case where the oblique form functions as a simple past…
The basic distinction that determines how each type of modality will be realised is the orientation: that is, the distinction between subjective and objective modality, and between the explicit and implicit variants… . The third variable in modality is the value that is attached to the modal judgement: high, median or low. … The median value is clearly set apart from the two ‘outer’ values by the system of polarity: the median is that in which the negative is freely transferable between the proposition and the modality… . With the outer values, on the other hand, if the negative is transferred the value switches (either from high to low, or from low to high)… . This generates a set of 4x4x3x3 = 144 categories of modality. … The actual number of systematic distinctions that are made in this corner of the language runs well into the tens of thousands;