VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

VŨ LỆ HUYỀN

A STUDY ON GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR IN
ENGLISH BUSINESS LETTERS
(Nghiên cứu về ẩn dụ ngữ pháp trong thư thương mại tiếng Anh)
M.A. MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15 Hanoi, 2011

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP …………………………………………………………….i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………ii
ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………………… iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………………… iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ……………………………………………………………… vii
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

PART A: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………… 1
1. Rationale …………………………………………………………………… 1
2. Objectives of the study ……………………………………………………… 2
3. Scope of the study …………………………………………………………….3
4. Methods of the study ………………………………………………………….3
5. Design of the study ……………………………………………………………3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT ………………………………………………… 5
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: OVERVIEW ON
SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR ………………5
1.1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………….5
1.2. Language and context ………………………………………………………5
1.3. Metafunctions ……………………………………………………………….7
1.4. Summary ………………………………………………………………… 10
CHAPTER 2: THE NOTION OF GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR …… 11
2.1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………… 11

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3. Limitations of the study …………………………………………………… 38
4. Suggestions for further studies ………………………………………………39

REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………… 40
APPENDIX 1 ………………………………………………………………………… I
APPENDIX 2………………………………………………………………………… X
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PART A: INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale
Metaphor, based on the association of similarity, is one of the two basic types of semantic
transference (metaphor and metonymy) that have been an interest for a great number of
linguistic researchers. According to Galperin (1981), the term “metaphor” can be understood
as the transference of some quality from one subject to another. Halliday gives a more detailed
notion, metaphor is a verbal transference; a variation in the expression of meanings
which
involves a non-literal use of a word. In particular, metaphor is an irregularity of content
that
consists on the use of a word in a sense different from its proper one and related to it in
terms
of
similarity. Let‟s see examples (1) and
(2).

(1) The sky is
crying.

(2) The old professor emeritus is a rock that is becoming brittle with
age.

Following the previous definitions, (1) includes an example of metaphor, i.e. “crying”.
This
word is used for something resembling that which it usually refers to, that is, it is used

correspondence. To achieve desirable results in communicating through business letters,
besides taking some remarkable features into account such as: style, language, structure of a
business letter, an aspect of the lexicogrammar which involves a higher level of complexity
in the process of production and interpretation of clauses – the use of grammatical metaphor
should be paid a great attention, too. However, it has not attracted enough research attention.
If we have a good knowledge of grammatical metaphor, we can achieve the desired effect
when dealing with business letters. We may have a better and more thorough understanding of
this written type of discourse.
A functional analysis of grammatical metaphor in discourse, especially in business letters
will be very helpful to benefit English learners in better understanding and employing target
language and thus improving the communicative competence more effectively.
Those theoretical and practical significances have inspired me to carry out A Study
on Grammatical Metaphor in English Business Letters.
2. Objectives of the study
The objectives of this paper are:
(i) to give a general understanding of grammatical metaphor in the light of functional
linguistics.
(ii) to examine some typical characteristics of business letters to show the general features of
this genre.
(iii) to give an analysis of the corpus of business letters in terms of grammatical metaphor in
order to see how this notable feature is used.
It is hoped that with these objectives, a full understanding of the use of grammatical metaphor
in business letters will be achieved.
Therefore, the research questions raised here are:
1) What is the frequency of the use of grammatical metaphor in English business letters?

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2) What types of grammatical metaphor are used in English business letters?
3. Scope of the study
Within the limitation of a minor thesis, this study only attempts to find out grammatical

Chapter 3 is the main part of the study. Firstly, some linguistic features of English
business letters will be taken into consideration. Then the analysis of the corpus in terms of
grammatical metaphor and the results of the study will be presented in this chapter.
Part C is the conclusion of the study which provides the recapitulation with reference to the
methods, the objectives and the findings of the present study. Then some implications for ESP
teaching and learning at tertiary level are also provided. After that it gives some suggestions
for further studies basing on the limitations of the thesis. 5
PART B: DEVELOPMENT
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

structural approaches, which place the elements of language and their combinations as central.
SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by,
this social context. Knowledge of context (culture and situation) tells us significant
information about how language will be used.
A central notion is 'stratification', such that language is analyzed in terms of four strata:
Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology.
SFL treats language and social context as complementary levels of semiosis, related by the
concept of realisation. The interpretation of social context then includes two communication
factors, genre (context of culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin,1992:495). The
context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of all of the
genres which make up a particular culture. Genres are staged, goal oriented social processes in
which people engage as members of the culture.
The context of situation of a text has been theorised by Halliday (Halliday and Hasan,
1985:12) in terms of the contextual variables of Field, Tenor and Mode.
Field of discourse: refers to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking
place: what is it the participants are engaged in, what is the text about?
Tenor of discourse: refers to who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses
and roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent
and temporary relationships of one kind or another…
Mode of discourse: refers to what part the language is playing, what it is that the participants
are expecting the language to do for them in that situation: the symbolic organization of the
text, the status that is has, and its function in the context, including the channel (is it spoken or
written or some combination of the two?) and also the rhetorical mode, what is being achieved
by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, expository, didactic and the like.
The summary of the relationship between language and context is displayed in Figure 1 below:

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Context of Culture
(Register + purpose)
Context of Situation

In each metafunction, an analysis of a clause gives a different kind of structure composed from
a different set of elements. In the ideational metafunction, a clause is analysed into Process,
Participants and Circumstances, with different participant types for different process types. In
the interpersonal metafunction, a clause is analysed into Mood and Residue, with the mood
element further analysed into Subject and Finite. In the textual metafunction, a clause is
analysed into Theme and Rheme.

Figure 2: Metafunctional Layering
(Matthiessen & Bateman, 1991)
Figure 2 shows an analysis of the sentence “In this job, Anne, we're working with silver” into
three different structures in the three metafunctions. This kind of diagram is called a
“metafunctional layering” diagram in SFG.

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The metafunctional theory is part of the “functional” side of SFG, but it is also important in
the “systemic” side of SFG. Each metafunction has a principal system in the networks for
clauses, verbal groups and nominal groups. For example the transitivity system is the principal
system for the ideational metafunction in the clause network. An important theoretical point is
that in general, in the system networks, the systems within each metafunction are closely
interconnected, but are largely independent of systems in the other metafunctions. This is
illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Independence of metafunctions
(Matthiessen and Halliday)
In this network fragment, there are normal dependency relationships within the mood region
of the interpersonal metafunction, between the mood type and indicative type systems and
between the indicative type and interrogative type systems, and there is also a further

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interconnection: the tagging system can be entered either from the imperative feature of the

CHAPTER 2: THE NOTION OF GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

2.1. Introduction
As we know metaphor is a very important feature in human language. There is no
exaggeration when we say that language itself is a metaphor. So metaphor is one of the most
popular and widespread figures of speech with a great variety of definitions given. This
chapter will deal with the discussion on metaphor, the two levels of metaphor: lexical and
grammatical metaphors. And of course further discussion and focus will be put on
grammatical metaphor.
2.2. Definitions of Metaphor
We now start with the definitions of metaphors. Aristotle is considered to be the first one that
builds a theory of metaphor. He defines metaphor as a “transfer of a name belonging
elsewhere” (cited in Michiel Leezenberg, 2001:33). However, this definition is merely at the
level of words.
Two cognitive linguists who have had a great contribution to the study on metaphor are Lakoff
and Johnson with a very well-known book “Metaphor We live By”. In this book, they defined
metaphor as a process by which we conceive “one thing in terms of another, and its primary
function is understanding” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 36). They have also revealed that
metaphors are not just found in poetic or literary language, but also play an important role in
colloquial language and everyday use.
A simplified definition is that metaphor is a “mapping of the structure of a source model onto
a target model” (Ungerer and Schmid 1999: 120). Metaphor is also defined in “A Handbook of
Literature” by William Harmon and Hugh Homan (1996) as “an analogy identifying one
object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second”.
In this definition, metaphor is viewed as the process of expressing one thing through another
due to the similarities of two objects.
We can see that, most of the definitions discussed so far pay much attention to the
metaphorical movement at lexical level, the changes happen to words, and this is called lexical
metaphor.


In other words, when a sequence is mapped onto, and thus realized as, a clause complex, a
figure mapped onto and realized as a clause, an element mapped onto and realized as a

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participant, the resulting clause complex, clause or participant is congruent. However, when a
sequence is mapped onto and realized as a clause or even an element, a figure is mapped onto
and realized as a participant, and an element is mapped onto a participant other than the usual
one, the resulting clause or participant is metaphorical.
2.4. Grammatical metaphor vs. Lexical Metaphor
Halliday (1985) suggests that metaphor does not necessarily happen at the lexical level but
often at the grammatical level, which is called grammatical metaphor. “We are looking at
metaphor not „from below‟, as variation in the meaning of a given expression, but rather
„from above‟, as variation in the expression of a given meaning” (1994: 342)
Halliday considered grammatical metaphor as a phenomenon “beyond the clause”. Metaphor
can be viewed from two different perspectives: traditional and new. Traditionally, metaphor is
viewed as variation in the use of words, i.e. variation in meaning: “a word is said to be used
with a transferred meaning” (Halliday: 1985). In this sense, a lexeme with a certain literal
meaning can have metaphorical, transferred uses or meanings. This is called a view “from
below”, taking the words as starting point, and then saying something about the meaning these
words realize. The other perspective introduced by Halliday is one “from above”. In this point
of view, the starting point is a meaning and metaphor is defined as “variation in the expression
of meanings”. These two perspectives can be seen clearly in Figure 5 below.
seen “from below” seen „from above‟
literally metaphorically „many people (protested)‟
„a moving mass „a moving mass of feeling
of water or rhetoric

a large number a flood
flood (of protests) (of protests)
congruent metaphorical

metaphor as variation in the expression of a
given meaning
comparison of the meaning of one lexeme
(in different collocational contexts)
comparison of various grammatical
configurations as expressions of the same
meaning
literal versus metaphorical meanings of a
given lexeme
degrees of (in)congruency: congruent and
less congruent expression of a given
meaning

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the concept of realization is not used in the
traditional view on metaphor
the feature of congruency applies to
realizations of the same meaning

Figure 6. Two perspectives on metaphorical variation

2.5. Classification of Grammatical Metaphor
Halliday makes a distinction between two main types of grammatical metaphor: There are two
main types of grammatical metaphor in the clause: metaphors of mood (including modality)
and metaphor of transitivity. In terms of the model of semantic functions, there are
respectively, interpersonal metaphors and ideational metaphors. (Halliday, 1994:343). Some
details of these two types will be discussed in the next part.
2.5.1. Ideational Grammatical Metaphors
Ideational Grammatical Metaphors are called metaphor of transitivity. The grammatical
variation between congruent and incongruent forms here applies to transitivity configurations,

along the river), the other as Affected (us) of a new material process expressed by the verb
took. Halliday (1994: 346) argues that a combined analysis should match the constituents of
the congruent and metaphorical versions as much as possible so that it may be easier to grasp
contrasts in grammatical function; this may also help us to show the simultaneous occurrence
of lexical metaphor and, most importantly, to draw justified conclusions as to the possible
functional motivation for the choice of a metaphorical variant:
„on the fifth day‟

„they‟
„at the summit‟
„arrived‟
circumstance:
Time
prep.phrase

participant:
Actor
n.group
circumstance:
Place
prep.phrase
process:
Material
verbal group the fifth day

metaphors are found in all types of adult discourse. However, complete congruency and
complete incongruency are rare: “It seems that, in most types of discourse, both spoken and
written, we tend to operate somewhere in between these two extremes. Something which is
totally congruent is likely to sound a bit flat; whereas the totally incongruent often seems
artificial and contrived.” (Halliday, 1985: 349)
In general, it is argued that written language has more ideational metaphors than spoken
discourse. This is attributed to a more general difference in types of complexity: written
language is said to be “lexical dense”, whereas spoken language is “grammatically intricate”.
In written language, various lexical meaning are often “packed” into one single nominal
group. This is the environment in which ideational metaphor occurs.
It is also needed to mention here the occurrence of demetaphorization: grammatical metaphors
gradually lose their metaphorical nature, and become “domesticated”. Halliday gives three
types of what he considers as “domesticated” transitivity metaphors in English:
(1) Expressions such as: have a bath, do a dance, make a mistake… In these forms, the
meaning of the process is expressed by the Range rather than the verb.
(2) Examples such as: She has brown eyes (which has congruent form as her eyes are
brown) or he has a broken wrist (congruent: his wrist is broken).
(3) Expressions such as: he writes good books (congruent: he writes books, which are
good) or we sell bargains (congruent: the thing we sell are cheap).

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2.5.2. Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphors
Two types of interpersonal grammatical metaphors can be distinguished as metaphors of mood
and of modality.
2.5.2.1. Modality metaphors
The grammatical variation which occurs is based on the logico-semantic relationship of
projection. In other words, projection is involved when modality is expressed metaphorically.
The projecting clause involved usually has a word or proposition which signifies belief,
likelihood, certainty, or other features which one connects with modality.
1. a. I think it‟s going to rain.

Interrogative  question
Declarative  statement
Imperative  command
Typical and metaphorical realizations of speech functions in mood types

speech
function
mood

statement
question
command
declarative
I have never let you
down!
I wonder where you
have been.
You should tell me
the truth.
interrogative
Have I ever let you
down?
Where have you
been?
Could you tell me
the truth?
imperative
Admit that I have
never let you down!
Tell me where you