Plenary Speech

Unbounded metaphorization

Abstract:

Theories are semantic constructs which demand access to the textual resources ‘by which the language creates a semiotic world of its own: a parallel universe …  that exists only at the level of meaning but serves both as means and as model or metaphor, for the world of action and experience’ (Halliday 1993: 107).   Our theories are metaphors for what we are theorizing (Halliday [2005] 2013:210).   Essential to one’s ability to construe theoretical knowledge is the ability to produce elaborated written texts such as one learns at school.  In the classroom text, not only can one’s experience be reconstrued through grammatical metaphor, but also the text itself can be recontextualized metaphorically, with one genre being deployed to represent another. Martin and Rose (2008) give the example of the children’s story, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, in which a caterpillar builds itself a cocoon, and turns into a beautiful butterfly – a recount genre representing a scientific explanation of metamorphosis.  Just as the lexical and grammatical strata can be freed from the control of semantics (and we call the outcome) a “grammatical metaphor”, so too when a text as semantic unit is freed from the controlling upper stratum of context, it makes sense (following the same practice of using the name of the lower stratum as the descriptor) to call the text-as-metaphorical-variant a “SEMANTIC METAPHOR”.  Semantic metaphors are distinguished from examples of grammatical metaphor corresponding to the textual metafunction, or “textual grammatical metaphor” (similar to grammatical metaphors which are ideational or interpersonal).   To succeed in a knowledge society, one needs to be thoroughly equipped with the grammatical resources necessary for unbounded metaphorization.