Identifying Nominalised Words Instead Of Unpacking Ideational Metaphor

Martin & Rose (2007: 207):

The text is also chock full of ideational metaphors alongside the occasional concrete participant (i.e. manuals, the priest, the penitent):

This internalisation of an exterior hierarchy consists of two interrelated procedures: the accounting of past events and the reproduction of the discourse of interrogation contained in the confession manuals.

First, the process of accounting. All confession manuals contain the unconditional demand that all sins be revealed

In terms of abstraction, discourse of this kind is probably the most metaphorical to have evolved in the history of writing in the world. Each sentence packs a lot of information into dense strings of abstract terms that derive from ideational metaphors, such as internal → internalise → internalisation.

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To be clear, here again the authors' view of ideational metaphor is limited to nominalisation: rewording the meanings of verbs and adjectives as nouns. Although nominalisation is 'the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 729), its rôle in ideational metaphor just part of a larger picture wherein semantic phenomena are re-mapped onto grammatical units. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 712-3, 719):

… 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 that we described in Chapters 5 and 7, 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. The two modes of realisation are contrasted diagrammatically in Figure 10-14 below.

Despite this section being concerned with ideational metaphor and periodicity, instead of unpacking any of the ideational metaphor, Martin & Rose have merely identified what they take to be nominalisations. One reason the authors cannot unpack ideational metaphor is their model does not provide an ideational semantics that distinguishes congruent from incongruent grammatical realisations. To begin to do so, they would need to draw on the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999).