The Becoming of Possibility: Grammatical Metaphor in a Relational Ontology: Ideational and Interpersonal Metaphor as Textual Deployments

Monday, 8 December 2025

Grammatical Metaphor in a Relational Ontology: Ideational and Interpersonal Metaphor as Textual Deployments

Grammatical metaphor has long been recognised as one of the major evolutionary achievements of language: a capacity to re-construe experience and re-enact interpersonal relations in ways that exceed the canonical grammatical patterns of the clause. But its internal ecology—how and why these metaphors operate as they do—has often been treated only implicitly. A relational-ontological perspective helps articulate the systemic dynamics that make grammatical metaphor possible, coherent, and functionally indispensable.

This post offers a unified account:

Ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors originate in their respective metafunctions, but they exist and operate as metaphors because the textual metafunction deploys them as second-order organisational resources.

This reframing preserves all of Halliday’s functional boundaries while offering a clearer systemic explanation of how grammatical metaphor works.

1. Grammatical Metaphor as Second-Order Deployment

Halliday describes grammatical metaphor as a “second-order” use of grammar: a mobilisation of one grammatical configuration to serve meanings typically enacted by another. In the relational model, this is understood as a shift in horizon organisation: meanings are lifted out of their default grammatical ecology and repurposed within an alternative structural constellation.

This second-order shift does not originate in the textual metafunction.

Rather:

Ideational grammatical metaphor originates in the pressure to re-construe experience—typically through nominalisation and the re-mapping of participant/process/circumstance relations.
Interpersonal grammatical metaphor originates in the pressure to re-enact roles, stances, and attitudes in ways that differ from their congruent realisation.

But neither type becomes metaphor simply by virtue of originating in these re-construal/re-enactment pressures.

Metaphor emerges only when the textual metafunction deploys these resources at a second-order level, integrating them into the organisation of information flow, cohesion, and thematic progression.

In other words:

Grammatical metaphor is not textual in origin, but textual in mode.

2. The Textual Metafunction as Horizon Regulator

While ideational and interpersonal resources generate the materials of metaphor, the textual metafunction provides the ecology in which these materials can function as metaphors.

The textual metafunction operates as a meta-system for horizon regulation—organising how meanings circulate, cluster, and cohere across a text. Its second-order nature means it is inherently predisposed to treat grammatical material as reusable, relocatable, and re-functionalisable.

Thus the textual metafunction:

motivates ideational metaphors to provide alternative groupings of information,
selects interpersonal metaphors to shape exchange rhythm and interpersonal alignment,
licences the redeployment of grammatical structures to sustain longer-range organisation of meaning,
and integrates metaphorical forms into the broader discourse architecture.

This aligns with Halliday’s repeated observations that:

textual organisation motivates the use of ideational metaphor,
textual constraints press metaphors into service,
and the textual metafunction is deeply implicated in grammatical metaphor without originating it.

Relational ontology simply makes this more explicit:

Metaphor becomes necessary when the textual organisation of a discourse requires the re-channeling of ideational or interpersonal semiosis into a more coherent or more manageable horizon configuration.

3. Ideational Metaphor as Textual Deployment

Ideational metaphor reshapes experiential domain structure.

Nominalisation is the canonical case: turning processes into things, qualities into participants, happenings into abstractions.

From a relational-ontological standpoint, this is a horizon compression: a way of reducing the local turbulence of clausal unfolding into more portable, manipulable units.

But this compression does not occur in isolation. It is almost always:

for information packaging,
for thematic consolidation,
for maintaining discourse flow,
for enabling denser logical relations,
or for supporting thematic progression.

Every one of these motives is textual.

Thus:

Ideational grammatical metaphor is an experiential re-construal functionalised by textual pressures toward coherence and distribution.

4. Interpersonal Metaphor as Textual Deployment

Interpersonal metaphor shifts how roles, stances, and attitudes are enacted.

This includes metaphorical mood (e.g., “Would you mind…?”), metaphorical modality (“It’s possible that…”, “I think that…”), and metaphorical evaluation.

Again, the originating impulse is interpersonal:

to modify modality, soften stance, amplify judgement, or negotiate alignment.

But the deployment is textual.

Interpersonal metaphors almost always serve:

to manage exchange structure,
to synchronise evaluative rhythm,
to distribute interpersonal load across the clause,
or to integrate stance with thematic progression.

Thus:

Interpersonal grammatical metaphor enacts alternative interpersonal roles that the textual organisation can more effectively integrate, sequence, or modulate.

5. Why the Textual Metafunction Has No Metaphors of Its Own

Halliday is clear:

the textual metafunction does not originate metaphor.

It is a meta-level organiser, not a domain of first-order meaning that could itself be incongruent.

But this does not mean textual meaning is absent.

Rather:

textual organisation is the mode through which metaphors are deployed,
textual pressures are the motivation for their distribution,
and textual resources are the infrastructure through which metaphorical configurations are integrated into the unfolding discourse.

Thus the textual metafunction is involved in every metaphor as a regulator, not as a source.

If the ideational and the interpersonal provide the material, the textual provides the horizon in which that material becomes metaphor.

6. A Unified Functional-Ecological Account

The entire system can be summarised in three statements:

Origins
- Ideational GM originates in experiential reconstrual.
- Interpersonal GM originates in role and stance re-enactment.
Mode
- Both function as metaphors only because they are deployed second-order by the textual metafunction.
Systemic Role
- GM is a key adaptation for maintaining discursive coherence in complex semantic ecologies.

This provides a functional interpretation that is both Hallidayan and relational.

7. The Relational Formula

Grammatical metaphor =

an ideational or interpersonal shift that is actualised as metaphor
through the textual organisation of discourse.

Or more succinctly:

Ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors are textual deployments of re-construal and re-enactment.

This is the simplest, clearest articulation that remains entirely faithful to Halliday’s architecture while revealing the systemic logic he left implicit.

The Becoming of Possibility