Grammatical Metaphor
Grammatical Metaphor
Grammatical Metaphor
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by Richard Nordquist
Updated March 03, 2017
DEFINITION
Also see:
Grammar
Metaphor
Nominalization
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
Technical Writing
What Is a Metaphor?
- "Examples given by Halliday are Mary came upon a wonderful sight and a
wonderful sight met Mary's eyes as metaphorical variants of Mary saw
something wonderful."
(Miriam Taverniers, "Grammatical Metaphor in SFL," Grammatical
Metaphor: Views From Systemic Functional Linguistics, ed. by A. M. Simon-
Vandenbergen et al. John Benjamins, 2003)
Conceptual Structuring
"[M]etaphorical vocabulary and metaphor themes structure our experience of
concepts such as emotion, education, disease, time or success. Similarly, but
in an even more fundamental way, the grammatical clauses of the language we
speak structure how we understand, experience and act on our material, social
and mental worlds. And just as there are levels of conventionality in our use of
vocabulary, . . . so there are usual or conventional clause patterns for
conceptualising and constructing events, and rather less typical clause
patterns, known variously as 'marked clause structure' or 'grammatical
metaphor.' For example, the usual way to refer to a Thing is by a noun, and
to a Process by a verb. A marked or metaphorical grammar would use a noun
to refer to a process, as in--'John's eating of the banana' rather than 'John ate
the banana.'"
(Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. John
Benjamins, 2007)
- "It has been established (e.g. Halliday, 1989: 94; 1987: 75)
that grammatical metaphor is a feature of written language more than of
spoken. And, by the same token written language generally displays
higher lexical density than spoken language, a convention that has been
sustained by Halliday (1995a: 14) who found average lexical densities of
technical/scientific texts to be around six while informal spontaneous speech
had around two lexical items per clause. This difference is a logical
consequence of the spoken mode being grammatically intricate. The number
of clauses goes up, while the number of lexical items remains constant."
(Inger Lassen, Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals: A
Survey of Style and Grammatical Metaphor. John Benjamins, 2003)