Interpersonal metaphor revisited: identification, categorization, and syndrome

ABSTRACT

Grammatical metaphor (ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor as sub-categories) “leads to an expansion of the meaning potential: by creating new patterns of structural realization, it opens up new systemic domains of meaning”. Ideational metaphor has been extensively studied in terms of identification, categorization, and application. Interpersonal metaphor, though being readily applicable to interaction-oriented disciplines, has not been studied in depth and many issues remain to be tackled. One significant issue is how to identify interpersonal metaphor, metaphors of mood in particular. With instances from the CORP corpus built out of successful reply posts by doctors and nurses on the health forum of doctorslounge.com, we propose two principles (Context-first Principle and AS IF Principle) that can be used to identify both metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality. Categories of interpersonal metaphor and the metaphoric syndrome can thus be described in a consistent way.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal metaphor
• Context-first Principle
• AS IF principle
• categories
• metaphoric syndrome

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bingjun Yang was once a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Basel University. He is now a full professor of systemic functional linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research articles appeared in journals like Language Sciences (Elsevier, 2004), Australian Journal of Linguistics (Taylor & Francis, 2014, 2015), and Journal of Quantitative Linguistics (Taylor & Francis, 2015). His recent academic books include the co-authored Language Policy: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Approach (Routledge, 2017) and Absolute Clauses in English from the Systemic Functional Perspective: A Corpus-based Study (Springer, 2015).

Notes

1 Note that the interpersonal metaphor is usually ignored in the current literature when grammatical metaphor and lexical metaphor are compared from the perspective of unconventional usages (e.g. Goatly 1996). Grammatical terminology were sometimes used in metaphorical expressions and then termed as grammatical metaphor (See Alford 1982), but this is quite different from grammatical metaphor in SFL.

2 Syndrome as a term is used by Halliday to differentiate the shift in lexical metaphor from that in grammatical metaphor. In lexical metaphor, a simple opposition is set up between two terms where no degrees may be drawn between. By contrast, the shift between categories in grammatical metaphor is usually more than one degree of metaphoric displacement. A congruent instance may proceed step by step towards the metaphorical, and the intermediate realizations may be more or less metaphorical. This phenomenon is called metaphoric syndrome (Halliday 2004, 79).

3 Please compare the contrast between “semiotic-discursive” and “physical-material” negotiation (Thibault 1995) and the view of language as being exchanged either on an “informational axis” (i.e. knowing) or on a “volitional axis” (i.e. wanting) (Davidse 1998, 152).

4 See the Appraisal Theory by J. R. Martin and his colleagues (e.g. Martin and White 2005) for more relevant information on adjuncts.

5 “Terms and Conditions of Use” on the homepage of the website says, “doctorslounge.com authorizes you to view or download a single copy of the material on the doctorslounge.com Site solely for your personal, noncommercial use if you include the copyright notice”, i.e. Copyright (c) 2001–2017, Doctors Lounge, All rights reserved.

6 Note that the square brackets indicate the labels for the text sources in the CORP corpus we built. For example, [Psyc-12] refers to the 12th reply post by doctors or nurses in the category of psychiatry. Keys for medical field labels mentioned in this article are as follows: CAR: cardiology; DERM: Dermatology; Fert: fertility; Gyne: gynecology; InfectD: infectious disease; Onc: oncology; Psyc: psychiatry; Surg: surgery.

7 This is roughly equivalent to “it is usual that we need more information”, so it can be considered as a usuality metaphor.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [15BYY016].