Objectives The purpose of this article is to identify the types of ideational metaphors in Korean and their characteristics. Methods The research method of this paper is the ideational metaphor theory of systemic functional linguistics, and the research object is the ideational metaphor expressions in Korean. Ideational metaphors are further subcategorized into empirical metaphors and logical metaphors. Empirical metaphors, also known as Transitivity system metaphors, are realized by the transition of semantic elements within a clause from congruent to incongruent (metaphorical type), whereas logical metaphors are realized by the transition alike between clause complex and Transitivity systems of other clauses. Results We found that there are 10 different types of ideational metaphors in Korean. They are as follows ‘process’ → ‘thing (noun)’ (<1.>), ‘process’ → ‘other process (verb)’ (<2.>), ‘circumstance’ → ‘thing(noun)’ (<3.>), ‘circumstance’ → ‘circumstance(multiword expressions)’ (<4.>), ‘figure’ → ‘figure(other clause)’ (<5. >), ‘relators’→‘thing (noun phrase)’ (<6.>), ‘relatiors’→‘process(verb)’ (<7.>), ‘relators’→‘circumstance(adverb or multi-word expressions)’ (<8.>), ‘relators’→‘relators(other clause complex)’ (<9.>), and ‘empty form(∅)’→‘thing(noun)’ (<10.>). In the process, we put forward two criteria for identifying ideational metaphors: the “two-level condition” and the “metaphoric form reorganization condition”. Conclusions The ten types of ideational metaphorical expressions identified in this paper indicate that there are various lexico-grammatical expressions with the same meaning in Korean. It is expected that these ideational metaphor expressions can be utilized in various ways in the field of Korean language education if they are organized into levels using rankshift or transitive types in discourse semantic elements.
Read full abstract