Reducing All Grammatical Metaphor To Elemental Metaphor

Martin & Rose (2007: 106-7):

Difficulties arise when processes are nominalised so that activities are coded as if they were things. An example is the nominal group the beginning of a beautiful relationship, in which the activity of two people relating to each other is nominalised as the Thing relationship, and so too is the phasing of this activity, as the Focus the beginning of... Halliday describes such patterns as grammatical metaphors, in which a semantic category such as a process is realised by an atypical grammatical class such as a noun, instead of a verb. In order to analyse such nominalisations in activity sequences, we can unpack them back to the processes from which they are derived, as follows:

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, by 'activity' here, Martin & Rose mean 'process'.  The problem with the term 'activity' is that it takes a material perspective on all processes.  Clearly, other process types, which are not activities, such as the 'relational' and 'existential', can also be "coded as if they were things" (possession, existence).

[2] To be clear, inceptive time-phase is realised grammatically at group rank as a relation of elaboration between verbal groups in a complex (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 569).

[3] To be clear, the term 'Focus' is the authors' rebranding of Halliday's 'extended Numerative', though applied by them (inconsistently) to nominal groups where Thing and Head are not conflated; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 390-6). 

[4] To be clear, this reduces grammatical metaphor to one type: the elemental (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 244-9). More broadly, ideational grammatical metaphor involves a directional remapping of meaning and wording. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 712-3):

… 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 congruent mode of realisation … a sequence is realised by a clause nexus and a figure is realised by a clause. 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.

[5] To be clear, in this instance of grammatical metaphor, a semantic figure is realised by a nominal group serving as Identifier/Value of the clause It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.