In Systemic Functional Grammar, language is understood as a system of meanings accompanied by certain forms, with which those meanings can be realized (Halliday, 1994). From the point of view of the functions performed by a natural language, each utterance encompasses three different levels of meaning: the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. In each metafunction, an analysis of a clause gives a different kind of structure composed from a different set of elements.
In the ideational metafunction, a clause is analyzed into Process, Participants and Circumstances, with different participant types for different process types. Types of process in English are shown in the diagrammatic summary as in Figure 1:
Figure 1: Types of process in English (Halliday, 1994:108)
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The framework for interpreting the clause in its ideational function involves three steps (Halliday, 1994:343):
Figure 2: Analysis in terms of transitivity
Variation in any of the selection can lead to ideational grammatical metaphor. For example, given “the fifth day saw them at the summit”, we can analyze either as in Figure 3a or as in Figure 3b.
the fifth day saw them at the summit
Senser Mental: perception Phenomenon Place
Figure 3a: Analysis of metaphorical form (Halliday, 1994:346) they arrived at the summit on the fifth day
Actor Material Place Time
Figure 3b: Analysis of congruent form (Halliday, 1994:346)
In the interpersonal metafunction, a clause is analyzed into Mood and Residue, of which the Mood element consists of two parts: Subject which is a nominal group and
Selection of process type: material, mental, relational, etc.
Configuration of transitivity functions: actor, goal, senser, etc.
representing the process, its participants and any circumstantial element
Sequence of group-phrase clauses: verbal group, nominal group, adverbial group, prepositional phrase, and their various sub-classes
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Finite which is part of a verbal group. The remainder of the clause is called the Residue. This analysis is presented in the following figure.
Subject Finite The remainder
Mood Residue
Figure 4: Analysis in terms of mood For example:
the duke has given that teapot away Subject Finite
Residue Mood
(Halliday, 1994: 74)
In the textual metafuction, a clause is analyzed into Theme and Rheme. Theme is the first constituent of the clause, and all the remainder of the clause is labeled Rheme.
This thematic structure is illustrated as follows:
The first constituent The remainder
Theme Rheme
Figure 5: Analysis in terms of theme For example:
the duke my aunt that teapot
has given my aunt that teapot
has been given that teapot by the duke the duke has given to my aunt
Theme Rheme
(Halliday, 1994: 38)
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Halliday (1985:321) considers that there are two kinds of expressions: congruent, also called non-metaphorical or non-marked; and incongruent, metaphorical or marked. In general, it is considered that people, places and things are realized by means of a noun, actions are realized verbally, circumstances are realized by prepositional phrases and adverbs. This is the typical, congruent relationship between semantic and grammatical categories that usually happens in spontaneous spoken language. However, all meanings may have more than one way of realization, and sometimes in written language, the realizations of the semantic functions of the clause are not typical, but marked. This realization constitutes a grammatical metaphor. In other words, grammatical metaphors are alternative realizations in which certain meanings are expressed through other grammatical means rather than the ones that have developed especially for them. Grammatical metaphor is a characteristic feature mostly of the written English. According to Kies (1995), it occurs quite commonly in all types of written English, from the informal varieties to the formal ones met in scientific and technical discourses. According to Halliday (2004b), nominalization is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. Through nominalization, processes (linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, in general, as adjectives) are reconstrued metaphorically as nouns, enabling an informationally dense discourse.
While treating nominalization as a grammatical metaphor, it is necessary to clarify how a grammatical metaphor differs from a simple metaphor. In tradition literacy criticism, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another that is not usually associated with it, e.g. A man is a lion (Cuddon and Preston, 1998:507).
Meantime, grammatical metaphor is a part of lexical morphology (i.e. nominalization) and deals with the meaning constructed in a different way by means of a different grammatical construction, e.g. the brakes failed = brake failure, when the verb failed
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becomes the noun failure. Here, the lexical items do not change in meaning but in function.
A great usage of metaphorical realizations increases lexical density since the nominal groups evolve into long and heavy expressions. This is the reason why nominalization is the form of grammatical metaphor regularly perceived under various labels. For example, when a verb is nominalized, what we have is an event or happening. Thus, such a process as translate can be seen as an entity translation, which can function as a nominal. The fact that languages abound in nouns such as these shows that grammatical metaphor is a very important alternative in the presenting of information (Downing and Locke, 2002:152).
To conclude this part, grammatical metaphor, the substitution of one grammatical class or structure for another, is a form of nominalization frequently met in academic discourse which has been identified and analysed by the linguist Halliday (1985, 1994).