The power of grammatical metaphor: How does it differ from conversion and derivation?

Miriam Taverniers

Abstract

If a language’s lexicogrammar is its “powerhouse” (Halliday 2005, 74), metaphor can be seen as the super process that ongoingly provides a language’s powerhouse with energy. This paper focuses on the nature of grammatical metaphor and its ‘power’. It explores grammatical metaphor as an inherent feature of languages being dynamic open systems, with multiple levels of encoding (stratification) that are related through metaredundancy. Grammatical metaphor is defined in terms of stratification, highlighting its features by taking a perspective ‘from above’, ‘from below’ and ‘from roundabout’. Then the paper addresses the issue of defining grammatical metaphor as a powerful process against more ‘mundane’ types of shift in language, viz. defining what distinguishes grammatical metaphor from processes such as transcategorization, conversion and rankshift.