Full realization principle for the identification of ideational grammatical metaphor: nominalization as example

ABSTRACT

When a clause like glass cracks more quickly is rankshifted and nominalized as glass crack growth rate, ideational grammatical metaphor (IGM) occurs. However, embedded clauses (e.g. the fact that it had been shown to be a forgery ruined his argument) are also rankshifted and nominalized, but they cannot be regarded as IGMs. This issue of embedding has tended to be relatively under studies within the theory of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). In order to tackle this issue, we propose a principle (i.e. the full realization principle, FRP) which operates in parallel with the principle of rankshift for the identification of IGMs. Under the FRP principle, a nominalization may be full, intermediate or raw in realization, but only the full nominalization which is compressed both in meaning and form can be regarded as IGM. As a necessary supplement to the rankshift principle, FRP helps distinguish nominalizations which are IGMs from those which are not, and the issue of embedding will not be a problem any longer. This in turn offers a new perspective to the categorization of nominalization in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideational grammatical metaphor
• rankshift principle
• full realization principle
• nominalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Rank in SFL refers to “the hierarchy of units according to their constituency potential” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999, 4) and the units include clause nexus (usually clause complex), clause, group/phrase, word, and morpheme. When a unit (e.g. clause) is replaced by another unit next below (e.g. group) for the purpose of meaning variation, rankshift occurs.

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 1998/2004b, 79).

Additional information

Funding

This research is Sponsored by Shanghai Pujiang Program (18PJC082).

Notes on contributors

Bingjun Yang

Dr. Bingjun Yang was once a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Basel University. He is now a tenured full professor of systemic functional linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research articles appeared in journals like Language Sciences (2004), Australian Journal of Linguistics (2014, 2015, 2018), Journal of Quantitative Linguistics (2015), Journal of World Languages (2017), Lingua (2018), and Social Semiotics (2019). 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).