Part I: Introduction
1 Rationale
Metaphor, based on the association of similarity, is one of the two basic types of semantic
transference that have been an interest for many linguistic researchers. Galperin ( 1981: 139-40)
states that the term ‘metaphor’ can be understood as the transference of some quality from one
object to another. Metaphor is widely used to designate the process in which a word acquires a
derivative meaning.
In theory, there are at least three communicative functions that metaphor might serve (Ortony
1975). First, they might allow one to express that which is difficult or impossible to express if
one is restricted to literal uses of language. Evidence for this "inexpressibility" claim would
constitute encouraging support for the necessity-of-metaphors view. A second possible function
of metaphors is that they may constitute a particularly compact means of communication.
Although conscious experience is continuous in form, the linguistic system we use to talk about
it is comprised of discrete elements (lexical items). Unlike more literal forms of language,
metaphor may enable us to convey a great deal of information in a succinct manner by obviating
the need to isolate the predicates to be expressed into their corresponding lexical representations.
Finally, metaphors may help capture the vividness of phenomenal experience. If metaphors
convey chunks of information rather than discrete units, they can paint a richer and more
detailed picture of our subjective experience than might be expressed by literal language. This
we call the "'vividness" claim.
In this paper we are interested in the first and last of these possible functions. Thus, we need to
examine a discourse domain for which a prima facie case can be made for supposing that literal
language will often be inadequate and which lends itself to variations in vividness. There
doubtless are many such domains. The one that we selected was that of internal states, in
particular, emotional states. The literature on the linguistic expression of emotions suggests a
relatively high incidence of figurative language use (Davitz 1969), providing pragmatic reasons
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
1
for believing that the context of (linguistic) emotional expression may be a profitable one within
which to study metaphor production. Emotional states seemed well-suited because they tend to
have an elusive, transient quality that is difficult to describe using literal language, although, of

describe and explain it. The study was conducted in a deductive approach where data was
collected from English literature to describe metaphor as a natural linguistic process. The
techniques involved in data analysis are both qualitative and quantitative.
The concepts of metaphor and emotion was discussed in systemic functional and cognitive
approach respectively, and in comparison with other linguistic views in a linear line of time. The
emotion metaphors was retrieved from metaphor dictionaries and corpus data and analyzed with
respect to the use of it to convey emotion. Only metaphor that helps conceptualize emotions was
studied.
5 Organization of the study
The study is composed of three parts.
• Part 1: Introduction. This part introduces the relevance, the aims, the scope and the
methodology of the study.
• Part 2 : Development. This part consists of two chapters:
- Chapter 1: Literature review: provided the theoretical background of the study. Its focus
was on introducing important concepts relevant to the topic of the thesis. This chapter
gave a general picture of metaphor. The notion of emotion and how it is expressed in
poetry via metaphor was also taken into consideration.
- Chapter 2: The study: In this chapter, the research design applied in the study was
reported and the results of the study were presented.
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
3
• Part 3 is the conclusion of the study which summarized the issues addressed in the main
part and offered implications for teaching and further study.
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
4
PART II: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW
I. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1 Introduction
Language is a systematic resource for expressing meaning in context and linguistics, according

The interpretation of social context includes two levels of communication: genre (context of
culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin 1992: 495).
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
6
Social Context

Language
Extralinguistic
levels
Linguistic levels
Figure 2 ( Source: http//:wwww.uefap.com/courses/beacc/fsl/intro/htm)
The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a combination of all of the genres
which make up a particular culture. Genres are the culturally evolved ways of achieving goals
that involve language. They are "staged, goal- oriented social processes" (Martin 1992: 505) in
which people engage as members of their culture. They are “social” because we participate in
genres with other people; goal-oriented because we use genres to get things done; staged
because it usually takes us a few steps to reach our goals" (Martin & Rose 2003: 7-8). Each
genre is therefore characterized by a distinctive schematic structure with a clear beginning,
middle and end through which the function of the genre is realized. These genres include all of
those routines from everyday experience such as purchase of goods (food, clothing etc), to the
genres of particular forms of social life including TV interviews, getting arrested etc. They also
include genres which are valued in education and business. Lectures are genres, as are seminars
and tutorials etc and written genres such as narratives, reports, explanations, procedures, and
expositions. These genres have their own distinctive structures (or well-established stages)
because of the social purposes they fulfill in the culture in which they are used. They occur in
particular situation types and it is the characteristics of this situation type that influence the
forms of language that realize the genre. So the context of situation (register) is the second
aspect of social context that influences the linguistic realization of the genre. This context of
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
7

(the social roles and relationships involved) and mode (the medium for communication).
Lexico-Grammar is a resource for putting meanings into words, i.e. realizing them as
configurations of lexical and grammatical items. It concerns the syntactic organization of words
into utterances, involving analysis of the utterance in terms of roles such as Actor, Agent,
Medium, Theme, Mood, etc. This gives Martin (1992:496):
Figure 4 Source: http//:wwww.uefap.com/courses/beacc/fsl/intro/htm on
5 Metafunctions, rank and the nominal group
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
9
5.1 Metafunctions
Central to SFL is the use of systems, used to represent the choices present in making an
utterance. The three systems related to the three metafunctions are: Transitivity,
Theme/Rheme and Mood & Modality. Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings
construing Field are realized Lexico-Grammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system
interprets and represents our experience of phenomena in the world by describing experiential
meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Interpersonal meanings are
realized Lexico-Grammatically by systems of Mood & Modality. The Mood system is the
central resource establishing an exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning
speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or information. Thus the giving of
information or goods and services is grammaticalized as declaratives, questions are
grammaticalized as interrogatives and commands as imperatives. Textual meanings are
concerned with the interaction of interpersonal and ideational information as text in context.
Lexico-Grammatically textual meanings are realized by systems of Theme/Rheme.
Theme/Rheme selections establish the orientation or angle on the interpersonal and ideational
concerns of the clause.
Figure 5 Source http//:www.uefap.com/cources/baecc/sfl/intro.htm
5. 2 Rank
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
10
Rank orders units into a hierarchy according to their constituency relation: the highest-ranking

An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
clause
Circumstance
participant Process Circumstance
Place
in her heart
Process
has grown
Actor
a secret love
Time
Lately
Clause
Theme
Lately
Rheme
a secret love has grown in her heart.
12
There is the third kind of meaning called interpersonal meaning which is realized by Mood and
Residue
Chart 3 : Clause structure- interpersonal metafunction - four functional parts by Martin,
Matthiessen & Painter (1997: 7-8)
5. 3 The nominal group
The metafunctional organization of the grammar that we illustrated above for the clause applies to the
other ranks as well. For example, the nominal group has ideational systems of THING TYPE,
CLASSIFICATION, EPITHESIS and QUALIFICATION, interpersonal systems of PERSON and
ATTITUDE, and textual systems of DETERMINATION. But the way the metafunctional
contributions map structurally one onto another varies; in particular, groups are organized both as
organic wholes and as logical complexes. The figure below shows an example of an English nominal
group.

and content is given form in the expression level ( phonology or graphology). Then, the
semantics level is classified into three metafunctions( experiential, interpersonal and textual) and
each of them is related to a specific context or register variable ( field, tenor or mode) which
then is realized through one or more of the lexico-grammartical systems ( transitivity, mood or
theme). Another notion of SFL is rank- the hierarchical relationship between the various units of
language, has also been mentioned .
II. METAPHOR: A GENERAL DESCRIPTION
1 Introduction
The notion of meaning potential is central to a systemic description of language: there are many
things we can mean, and in order to communicate we choose from this range of potential
meanings. Therefore, a theory of language must be able to describe both the potential, and the
initiation of a choice from that potential. If the relationship between the meaning potential and
the realization of a choice was totally random, then language would be impossible to describe
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
14
and study, and probably useless as a communication tool. Evidently, the relationship is not
random. Halliday ( 1994:343) states that “ ... for any selection in meaning there will be a natural
sequence of steps leading towards its realization”.
2 Definition of metaphor
Traditionally, metaphor has been viewed as poetic or literary language. Nevertheless, in the last
few decades, cognitive linguists like, for example, Lakoff and Johnson have revealed that
metaphors play an important part in colloquial language and everyday use. Lakoff and Johnson
have found that “metaphor is conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is
fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (1980: 3). Even though not all language is metaphorical,
metaphors are indeed an important part of language. (Saeed 2003: 247).
So how do we define metaphor? It is taken to be ( as the name suggests in Greek) a transfer of
some kind. We will mention some of the definitions of metaphor as follows.
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). The source and the target domain of a metaphor
belong to two different cognitive domains. To complicate things these belong to different

ANGER IS HEAT: He was steaming. I thought he was going to explode.
Wait until you’ve cooled down.
LOVE IS HEAT: She positively glowed.
He gave me an icy stare.
Come on baby, light my fire.
LOVE IS (MAGNETIC) ATTRACTION: We’re poles apart. I keep being drawn back to her.
She turns heads wherever she goes.
ANXIETY IS A BURDEN: It’s been a great weight off my mind.
He had been labouring under that assumption for a long time.
Let me shoulder some of your worries for a while.
SADNESS IS A BURDEN: It’s weighing me down.
It’s the last straw (that broke the camel’s back).
I keep being dragged under.
On summary, many researchers have been working on giving out a definition of metaphor but
there has not been a universal one yet. One broad and better definition is given by Kleinginna
and Kleinginna (1981). They gathered, analyzed and classified 92 definitions and 9 skeptical
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
17
statements about the concept of emotion concluding that there is little consistency among
definitions and many are too vague. Therefore, the researchers suggested a comprehensive
definition as follows:
"Emotion is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors,
mediated by neural/hormonal systems, which can:
(a) give rise to affective experiences such as feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure;
(b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant perceptual effects,
appraisals, labeling processes;
(c)activate widespread physiological adjustments to the arousing conditions; and
(d) lead to behavior that is often, but not always, expressive, goal directed, and adaptive"
(Kleinginna and Kleinginna 1981 p. 355).
So far we have discussed the metaphorical movement in lexical level, the changes happen to

grammatical means of expression, such as a clause and a nominal group. According to Halliday,
grammatical metaphor is conceived as an incongruent realization of a given semantic
configuration in the lexicogrammar ( 1985: 321)
4 Classification of grammatical metaphor
In general, there are four kinds of grammartical metaphor: ideational (experiential),
interpersonal, , logical and. textual. They occur when the usual or ‘congruent’ realization of
meaning is given a ‘non congruent’ or metaphorical expression. The ideational grammatical
metaphor relates to the experiential meaning, the logical metaphor to the textual meaning and
the interpersonal metaphor to the interpersonal meaning.
4.1 Congruent realization of meaning
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
19
SFL describes the congruent form of representing experience like this:
Example 1: Congruent realization of meaning
(1) He is furious because his wife has been kidnapped.
In the following example we have a more incongruent form of representing reality through a
grammatical metaphor:
Example 2: Incongruent realization of meaning: grammatical metaphor
(2) He is in a flood of anger because his wife has been kidnapped.
Why consider this a metaphorical expression? The answer relies on the acceptance of the notion
that the congruent form is the unmarked way we represent experience and that the alternative or
marked realization is a form of metaphor.
Congruent Metaphorical
1. Adjective (Qualifier) Noun (Entity)
2. Verb (Process) Noun (Entity)
3. Verb (Process) Adjective (Qualifier)
4. Adverb (Circumstance) Adjective (Qualifier)
5.Conjunction (Relator) Prepositional Phrase ( Circumstance)
Table 2 - Class shift (semantic type)
( Adapted from Halliday 1995)

(4) He didn’t grasp it.
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
21
The form of a noun phrase can be borrowed to express processes (which are normally realized
by means of clauses), but it can also be used metaphorically to express qualities, which are by
default encoded by adjectives. In this sense, (6) is a metaphorical variant of (5).
(5) She is dishonest.
(6) You cannot really count on her honesty.
Another common sub-type of ideational metaphor is where a process (normally expressed by
means of clause) comes to be expressed by means of an adjective, and thus, comes to be
conceived of as a quality instead.
Ideational metaphor is a powerful resource in the grammar of a language, by which the
expression of ideational meanings such as processes, qualities and entities is extended in
important ways beyond their default encodings as clauses, adjectives and nouns (or noun
phrases) respectively: different forms can be borrowed to express different meanings.
4.4 .Interpersonal grammatical metaphor
The main function of the ideational grammatical metaphor is to condense the information as a
way to pack more lexical items in one clause at the expense of deleting the participants and time
of the processes, i.e. the ideational grammatical metaphor is a more metaphorical way of
expressing the meaning at the level of experience. The interpersonal grammatical metaphor, on
the other hand, can be described as a metaphorical way to express interpersonal meanings that
are congruently represented in mood and modality choices. The use of this kind of grammatical
metaphor is especially important in language as they allow for a more explicit or implicit
presence of the writer/speaker in the discourse
The interpersonal component of grammar especially concerns the areas of modality and mood.
In these two areas, Halliday also distinguishes between basic, non-metaphorical expressions, and
metaphorical ones, i.e. inter- personal metaphors. Let us look at each area in turn.
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
22
A default realization of a modal meaning, for example, a degree of certainty, according to

commands by the imperative, as we have seen in examples (2)–(4) above. The expression of
statements and questions is fairly straightforward, but with regard to commands, the situation is
different. There is a large variety of expressions that can be used to express the same command:
(11) Send your proposal by email, please.
(12) a. Could you send your proposal by email, please ?
b. I would advise you to send it by email.
c. You are kindly requested to send your proposal by email.
d. It is recommended that you send your proposal by email.
e. It is advisable to send your proposal by email.
The examples in (11) are different metaphorical variants of expressing a command that can also
be expressed, in its most straightforward, standard way, as an imperative (11). The metaphorical
examples in (12) include the interrogative mood type (which is the standard expression of
requests for information), and the declarative mood type (which normally, i.e. non-
metaphorically, expresses the speech function of giving information). Halliday brings together
these various expressions under the heading of the notion of interpersonal metaphor of mood.
The reason why these examples are regarded as metaphorical, lies in the fact that they deviate
from the standard, most straightforward realization of a command by means of the imperative
mood. Their metaphorical nature can be made clear by pointing to the literal meanings that these
expressions have. For instance, (12a), at face-value, is basically a request for information: ‘could
you send your proposal by email, or couldn’t you’? Similarly, at face-value, (12b) only refers to
a statement: I state that I advise something to you.
The metaphorical nature of such metaphors of mood is exploited in verbal play. A case in point
is the well-known dinner-table example, where someone asks: Can you pass me the salt, please?,
An investigation into the role of metaphor in description of emotion in poetic discourse
24
and the addressee answers, ‘Yes, I could certainly do that’, without undertaking any further
action with regard to the salt.
4.5 Textual grammatical metaphor
Halliday (1994) does not include this kind of grammatical metaphor in his stydy. Martin (1992)
is the only systemic scholar who deals with metaphor from the textual perspective. He states that