Misrepresenting Ideational Metaphor

Martin & Rose (2007: 112):

Ideational metaphor tends to reconstrue our experience of reality as if it consisted of relations between institutional abstractions. These strategies have evolved to enable writers to generalise about social processes, and to describe, classify and evaluate them. One cost is that it may be hard to recover who is doing what to whom; another is that this type of discourse can be very hard to read and understand. Unpacking ideational metaphors as we have shown here can help to reveal how they construe reality and is one key strategy for teaching language learners how they work.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this bare assertion, unsupported by evidence, severely under-represents the range of functions of ideational metaphor.  For example, what institutional abstractions and what relations between them are construed by the grammatical metaphor in the volume of the screeching of lorikeets signals the degree to which they are alarmed?

[2] To be clear, on the SFL model, reality is the ideational meaning we construe of experience. Here Martin & Rose identify reality with the domain that is transcendent of semiotic systems.

[3] To be clear, evolution happens 'because' (cause: reason) not 'in order to' (cause: purpose).  For example, in biology, eyes evolved because they afford behavioural advantages, not in order to afford behavioural advantages.

[4] To be clear, the function of ideational metaphor is not merely to generalise about social processes.  For example, what social process is being generalised about by the ideational metaphor in Quantum systems can become entangled through various types of interactions?

[5] This is misleadingly presented as if it is the authors' insight, rather than Halliday's.

[6] To be clear, as previous posts have shown, Martin & Rose reduce all ideational metaphor to one type, elemental metaphor, and their "unpacking" of metaphor consists of little more than rewording the text and ignoring the metaphorical wording, thereby ignoring the junctional nature of metaphor.