Monday 18 May 2015

Lexical Metaphor

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 233):
There are two other characteristics of lexical metaphors which are also central to metaphor in its grammatical sense. The first is syntagmatic: lexical metaphors tend to occur in regular clusters, which we shall refer to here as “syndromes” … The second is paradigmatic: lexical metaphors typically involve a shift towards the concrete, a move in the direction of “objectifying” (‘making like an object’, not ‘making objective’) …