Romero, E. y Soria, B.: 2005, "The Notion of Grammatical Metaphor in Halliday". En J.L. Martínez-Dueñas Espejo, C. Pérez Basanta, N. Mclaren y L. Quereda Rodríguez-Navarro (eds.), Towards an Undertanding of the English Language: Past, Present and Future. Studies in Honour of Fernando Serrano, Granada, Universidad de Granada, 143-158.

Abstract:

 In this paper, we claim that the use of “metaphor” in the Hallidayan use of the expression “grammatical metaphor” is metaphorical and has a metaphorical meaning. In addition, we defend that the notion of grammatical metaphor is metaphorically constructed from an outdated notion of metaphor. In this respect we argue that calling it “grammatical metaphor” creates some expectations on the part of the reader, to wit, that it is about a kind of metaphor and that there are metaphors that depend exclusively on the grammatical structure of an expression. Nevertheless, the notion of grammatical metaphor refers to certain non-natural grammatical variations of natural grammatical structures and thus the expectations are not fulfilled. We also defend that the name chosen for this theory is metaphorical because Halliday describes certain grammatical variations from his ideas about metaphor. Finally, we evaluate the metaphorical notion to show that it would have been more illuminating to take a more adequate description of metaphor as the starting point for the metaphorical production of the notion. This way, the conventional side of the relation between reality and grammatical form would have been transparent. Furthermore, the metaphorical origin of the Hallidayan notion of incongruity and the extra-effects that the grammatical variation entails would have been noted.