One of the most persistent myths about language is that it merely labels a world whose structure is already given. In this view, novelty belongs either to the mind (as creative invention) or to the world (as brute emergence), while language passively follows behind.
Systemic Functional Linguistics dismantles this myth at a far more fundamental level. In Halliday’s account, language is not a mirror of reality but a resource for making distinctions, and it is precisely through the expansion of those resources that new possibilities of meaning — and coordination — come into being.
The most powerful of these expansion mechanisms is grammatical metaphor.
Congruence and Its Limits
In a congruent mapping, meanings are realised through the lexicogrammar in their most typical form:
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processes as clauses
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participants as nominal groups
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relations as conjunctions
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qualities as adjectives
For example:
The economy collapsed.
Here, a process (collapse) is realised as a verbal process, with participants organised accordingly. This mapping feels “natural” not because it reflects reality more faithfully, but because it aligns with the most frequent and historically prior mappings in the system.
Congruence, however, is not a limit on meaning. It is simply one region of the system’s potential.
Grammatical Metaphor as Systemic Re-Mapping
Grammatical metaphor occurs when meanings are realised non-congruently — not as stylistic deviation, but as a systemic option within the language.
Consider:
The collapse of the economy.
What was realised congruently as a process is now realised metaphorically as a Thing. This is not a lexical flourish. It is a re-engineering of the semantic–lexicogrammatical interface.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) explain this move in terms of a token–value relation within the semantic stratum:
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The token is the metaphorical (the collapse of the economy).
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The value is the congruent (the economy collapsed).
Crucially, the value is not replaced. It remains available as part of the semantic system. What grammatical metaphor does is add a new semiotic option, expanding what the system can do.
This is how the semantic system grows.
Expansion Without Inner Invention
Nothing here requires a creative mind inventing meanings from within. Grammatical metaphor is:
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systemic, not psychological
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collective, not individual
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historical, not spontaneous
When a process becomes a Thing, it can now:
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enter into taxonomies
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participate in logical relations
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be quantified, compared, accumulated
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function as an object of technical reasoning
This is why scientific, bureaucratic, legal, and philosophical discourse rely so heavily on grammatical metaphor. It allows meanings to be stabilised, transported, and recombined across contexts.
Novelty arises not from imagination, but from new relational affordances.
Semiotic Novelty as Relational Reconfiguration
Grammatical metaphor does not introduce new meanings ex nihilo. Instead, it reconfigures how existing meanings can relate to one another.
By expanding the range of possible tokens for a given value, the language system:
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opens new pathways of reasoning
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supports new forms of coordination
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enables new kinds of institutional practice
In relational terms, grammatical metaphor is a cut in the space of possibility — one that makes certain relations selectable that were previously unavailable or unstable.
This is why semiotic novelty is recognisable after it appears. Once the system has expanded, the new configuration becomes retrospectively intelligible, even inevitable.
Against the Myth of Metaphor as Ornament
Grammatical metaphor is often misdescribed as:
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stylistic sophistication
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academic ornamentation
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dense or obscure wording
These descriptions miss the point entirely.
What grammatical metaphor really does is alter the topology of meaning. It changes what can be treated as a thing, what can be related to what, and what kinds of distinctions can be sustained over time.
Grammatical Metaphor and the Becoming of Possibility
Seen through a relational ontology, grammatical metaphor is not a linguistic curiosity. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which:
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knowledge becomes cumulative
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abstraction becomes operational
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institutions coordinate at scale
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futures become thinkable
It is a clear demonstration that possibility does not precede language fully formed. Possibility is differentiated, weighted, and stabilised through semiotic systems — and grammatical metaphor is one of their most powerful engines.
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