Publications
Publication details [#10299]
Steen, Gerard J. 2006. Review of Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, Miriam Taverniers, and Louise Ravelli (eds.), 'Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic Functional Linguistics'. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (3) : 435–442.
Publication type
Review/summary
Publication language
English
Keywords
Abstract
Cognitive Grammar, or more generally cognitive linguistics, is often seen as one functionalist approach to the study of language. It is therefore interesting to see what another functionalist approach to language, Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), has to say about one of the most cherished topics of investigation in cognitive linguistics, metaphor. The specific class of metaphors that is the topic of the book under review, grammatical metaphor, was introduced by Michael Halliday, in his well-known Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985). Grammatical metaphor was intended as the grammatical complement of the more widely recognized phenomenon of lexical metaphor, which has attracted most attention in cognitive linguistics. Grammatical metaphor, in the view of Halliday, involves the "incongruent" expression of what could be said more congruently, as in 'Mary saw something wonderful' and 'Mary came upon a wonderful sight'
(Gerard Steen)