CONFIRMACIÓN

Expressions involving nominalization (take a bath, have a look, and so on) are identified in SFL as examples of grammatical metaphor. In essence, we perceive bathing as ‘doing’. The usual way of encoding such phenomena in English is to opt for material process with an Actor; hence, we have the possibility of saying: I bathed, I looked, and so on. This choice, where the process matches our perception of bathing as ‘doing’ rather than a thing, is said to be congruent. The nominalized form is designated non-congruent or

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more usually grammatical metaphor. In The driver looked at Whisper, the form looked has been chosen; the author might have used the non-congruent grammatical forms took a look or had a look, but chose not to. Similarly, he might have written gave a nod in place of nodded (in The driver looked at Whisper, who nodded) but again opted for the congruent expression with the process realized as a verb.

In its usual sense, the term metaphor applies to a figurative use of language where something is implicitly suggested as having the qualities of something else; one thing is seen in terms of another. Simple examples are Life was a song; Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; He is a real pussy-cat. Slightly more complicated examples are The fog comes / on little cat feet; epidemics wiped out the population; a fat salary. In fact, metaphor permeates the lan-guage in everyday expressions such as lower your guard; open your heart;

break a promise; retreat from the world; build up a relationship; drop a hint, a sharp tongue, and, less obviously, in such expressions as raise the price, a fall in temperature, a full life, waste one’s time. The antithesis of ‘metaphor-ical’ in this sense is ‘literal’. My life was a song is metaphorical; I was happy is literal.

Grammatical metaphor resembles traditional metaphor (mainly lexical) in that it involves a choice between a more straightforward and a more oblique realization of meaning. But the choice is made within the available grammat-ical options rather than the lexgrammat-ical options – not so much one word/idea instead of another as one grammatical form instead of another, though, of course, this will usually entail more extensive differences of ‘meaning’. And just as there is no suggestion that literal expression is intrinsically better or worse than metaphorical expression, there is also no suggestion that congru-ent forms are better or worse than grammatically metaphorical ones. Nor is the congruent form necessarily the more frequently used form. Sometimes the grammatically metaphorical form may be more usual in current usage. I had a bath is more usual in contemporary English than I bathed, but I listened is more usual than I had a listen. Pay attention is a fairly clear example of a metaphorical expression which has become idiomatic. It combines tradition-al metaphor with grammatictradition-al metaphor: the lexictradition-al item pay suggests that we are treating the process of attending as if it were currency; the nominalization of the process as the abstract noun attention exploits the grammatical metaphor option. The clause Life was a song also combines literary and gram-matical metaphor, and the literal paraphrases Life was happy and I was happy with my life retain the grammatical metaphor. More congruently, but less effi-ciently, we might say: I was alive and I was happy (to be so).

In fact, different contexts may demand different alternatives, and here reg-ister and genre are crucial. Situational and textual factors have a considerable bearing on which options are preferred in any particular instance. We may have seemed to suggest sometimes that congruent and grammatically Grammatical metaphor 127

metaphorical alternatives are simply variant ways of saying the same thing, but the truth is that any difference in expression means a difference in mean-ing of some kind. Even the choice between bathe and take a bath has situ-ational or stylistic significance. Most English speakers are more likely to feel comfortable with writing Cleopatra is said to have bathed in ass’s milk (in literary-historical register) than with saying I think I’ll bathe before I go to bed (in informal conversation register).

One way of looking at nominalization is to say that it involves an alterna-tion within the experiential metafuncalterna-tion: instead of being realized by a verb (bathe, think, explain, destroy), a process is realized as a thing (bath, thought, explanation, destruction). This is a very imprecise formulation, but it may help us to see what is going on. The expressive possibilities available to a nominalized process form are different from those available to processes real-ized as verbs. For example, a nominalization can be succinctly modified with adjectives: the recent deplorable destruction of villages has a brevity that is hard to achieve with the more congruent use of the verb destroy in place of the noun destruction. Moreover, the nominal group expressing the process is available for use as Subject or Complement or part of an Adjunct: the recent deplorable destruction of villages cannot be justified on these grounds; the spokesman condemned the recent deplorable destruction of villages; this intransigent attitude has been strengthened by the recent deplorable destruc-tion of villages.

For these reasons, among others, this type of grammatical metaphor is par-ticularly important in formal written style, appearing frequently in such gen-res as university textbooks and academic journals, and in what is loosely known as scientific writing. The following extract is from a popular science book:

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. . . . if the water is magnified a few million times, there will be revealed a strongly expressed granular structure formed by a large number of separate molecules closely packed together. Under the same magnifica-tion it is also apparent that the water is far from still, and that its mol-ecules are in a state of violent agitation moving around and pushing one another as though they were people in a highly excited crowd. This irregular motion of water molecules, or the molecules of any other material substance is known as heat (or thermal) motion.

Text 6D (Gamow, One Two Three . . . Infinity,²p. 185)

In the first sentence, we have the verb is magnified, the process being real-ized by a passive voice verbal group. The circumstances of the process are spelled out too: it is a massive magnification of a few million. Subsequently

this same process is referred to using the grammatical metaphor (nominaliza-tion): the same magnification. The nominalization enables the writer to avoid the stylistically clumsy repetition of the group a few million times. In the next sentence we find the verb moving realizing a process, which is picked up in the final sentence as (This irregular) motion. The modified nominalization cohesively encapsulates all the information conveyed in the previous embed-ded clauses that the water .... crowd. (See cohesion in Section 5.4 of this vol-ume.) It also makes this information available to be presented as Theme, thus contributing to the continuing unfolding of the text as message (see Chapter 4).

Sometimes, though, the grammatically metaphorical form can be more unwieldy than a more congruent counterpart, as in the metaphorical (50) from the same source and our slightly more congruent (50a):

(50) the evaporation of liquids takes place at different temperatures for different materials

(50a) different liquids evaporate at different temperatures for different materials Of course the co-text must be taken into account, and generally, texts which make heavy use of nominalization are able to pack in a lot of information eco-nomically; as a result, they tend to be denser and are sometimes more difficult to process. At its worst, inept or inappropriate use of nominalization may cre-ate an impression of pomposity or pretentiousness, but it is a valuable and even essential part of language use.

Example (51) is part of a sentence from a published medical research abstract.

(51) The GDP counts contributed to intraoperative decision making in three patients, . . . . by localisation of tumour not identified by inspection of palpa-tion . . . . .

[GDP = Gamma detecting probe; palpation = feeling with the fingertips]

This is comprehensible to readers from outside the medical profession only with considerable effort. But if we try to paraphrase it with more congruent forms (51a), the result is far from satisfactory.

(51a) Someone used a GDP and, by using the figures which came up, surgeons could decide what to do while they were operating on three patients. They could do this because they could find precisely where a tumour was even though this had not been found out by palpating the patients’ bodies.

No doubt a better rendering than (51a) could be constructed, but there is nearly always something lost when such attempts are made – and, as in this case, there is often something added that may be unnecessary, undesirable or simply wrong. For one thing, the paraphrase uses 51 words to the original’s 21, and, since the genre here is an abstract (a brief account where space is limited), that is a serious disadvantage. For another, the rewrite is more Grammatical metaphor 129

specific about the agents than the original is. We can’t be sure that the deci-sions are all made by surgeons. It may, for example, be anaesthetists who are helped in this way. It is redundant to say that ‘someone’ used a GDP, and in this context it doesn’t matter; all that matters is what was found out by using it. True, the original is hard for a lay reader to process, but for a specialist it presents no problems, and this is communication between specialists. It is not necessary for outsiders to understand it. People sometimes argue that all writ-ing should be comprehensible to any reader, but this is unrealistic. No doubt writers are sometimes deliberately and unnecessarily obscure for sinister rea-sons, but interaction is determined, among other things, by the nature and relations of the interactants. If the authors had been writing for a lay audience they would certainly have expressed themselves differently though it is unlikely that they would have completely avoided grammatical metaphor; nor is such avoidance necessary or desirable.

Nevertheless, it is often useful for an analyst or a critical reader to attempt to rephrase a structure in order to get at the way the language is being used or to identify the author’s intentions and effects. Such a procedure is sometimes called ‘unpacking’, and it can shed light on the manipulation of the reader or listener by a writer or speaker, among other things.