Tuesday 2 March 2021

Misunderstanding Interpersonal Metaphor As The Experientialisation Of Non-Experiential Meaning

 Fawcett (2010: 210-1):

While the nominalisation of events is both the most frequent type of incongruence and the type with the most subtle variations, there are many others, such as the expression of a quality as a thing, e.g., his great happiness.
Halliday discusses such phenomena under the general heading of "grammatical metaphor" (e.g., Halliday 1994:340f.). However, the scope of the term has become very broad, and I find it more helpful to think in terms of specific types of phenomena. Thus, nominalisation occurs within experiential meaning, so that it is a different matter from the experientialisation of non-experiential meaning — e.g., saying It's possible that he'll be there rather than He may be there. See Fawcett (in press) for a rather fuller picture of these relationships.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misunderstands nominalisation. To be clear, in SFL Theory, nominalisation is the reconstrual of processes and qualities as things (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 314). That is, Fawcett's "other" type of incongruence is actually just another example of nominalisation.

[2] This is misleading. Halliday's grammatical metaphor is an incongruent relation between semantics and grammar, not between an extra-linguistic belief system and linguistic meaning (semantics).

[3] To be clear, the theoretical notion of grammatical metaphor is clearly defined and systematically described. For ideational metaphor, see Chapter 6 in Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 227-296).

[4] To be clear, in SFL Theory, this is an instance of an interpersonal metaphor of modality, not "the experientialisation of non-experiential meaning". The non-metaphorical use of may is an instance of implicit subjective modality, whereas the metaphorical use of it's possible that is an instance of explicit objective modality. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 186):

[5] To be clear, Fawcett (in press) is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this publication.

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