Textual Metaphor Revisited

Abstract

Textual metaphor remains controversial in the theory of grammatical metaphor in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): only textual effects are acknowledged by some systemicists (e.g. M.A.K. Halliday, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen) while textual metaphor is regarded as an indispensable component of grammatical metaphor by some other systemicists (e.g. J.R. Martin, G. Thompson). In this article, we aim to examine problems in the definition and identification of textual metaphor. With the well-known instances in the literature of textual metaphor as data, we reviewed textual metaphor so far discussed in the SFL literature and found that five problems particularly need to be solved: a lack of contrast between congruent and incongruent forms is conspicuous in many instances of textual metaphor; a good number of typical textual metaphors cannot be distinguished from ideational metaphors which are formed out of clause nexuses down-rankshifted into clauses; nominalization plays a dominant role in almost all textual metaphors; current principles of identifying textual metaphor do not work with many typical cases; and no specific function has been recognized for textual metaphor. These problems suggest that the term ‘textual metaphor’ in SFL should be either discarded or redefined.