Connexion: Grammatical Metaphor

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 14):

In terms of grammatical metaphor CONNEXION allows us to formalise relations between figures realised congruently between clauses or metaphorically as single clauses:

(30) (congruent clause complex construing a causal sequence)

Because he was harassing her, she left the parking lot.

(31) (metaphorical cause in the clause)

His harassment led to her departure.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the disadvantage of using Martin's CONNEXION instead of Halliday & Matthiessen's ideational semantics in modelling grammatical metaphor is that Martin's CONNEXION can only account for metaphor involving expansion relations that are additive, comparative, temporal or causal — and these without regard for the more general categories of elaboration, extension and enhancement — and cannot account for grammatical metaphor involving projection, such as the following example, which moves from the congruent to the increasingly metaphorical (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 711):

(a) Most linguists today believe → that there is no good evidence ...
(b) the strongest belief of all is [[ that there is no trace ... ]]
(c) these firmly entrenched – and vigorously defended – beliefs