Ideational metaphor in english and vietnamese behavioral clauses

Ideational Metaphor in English and Vietnamese Behavioral Clauses Nguyen Thi Tu Trinh*, Phan Van Hoa**, Tran Huu Phuc*** Abstract: The concepts of ideational and interpersonal metaphor a

Ideational Metaphor in English and Vietnamese

Behavioral Clauses

Nguyen Thi Tu Trinh*, Phan Van Hoa**, Tran Huu Phuc***

Abstract: The concepts of ideational and interpersonal metaphor are introduced in

Halliday‟s An Introduction into Functional Grammar (1985) in which he differentiates his

newly-identified grammatical metaphor from “figures of speech” metaphor This article is devoted to interpreting the three major types of typical patterns of the ideational grammar

of behavioral clauses in English and Vietnamese within the framework elaborated by Halliday and Matthiessen (2000, 2004); Martin et al (1997) as well as making comparisons of these patterns in the two languages Attention has been paid to describing a wide range of constructions and shift patterns of ideational metaphor (transitivity metaphor) and the grammatical variants between congruent and incongruent forms applying to transitivity configurations in English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses The analysis of characteristics of ideational metaphor in behavioral clauses is conducted on five English and five Vietnamese novels and short stories from the 19th century to present The

conclusion points out some new results and suggests some practical applications

Keywords: Ideational metaphor; Behavioral clauses; Functional grammar

Received 3 rd November 2017; Revised 27 th March 2018; Accepted 30 th April 2018

1 Introduction *

Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as

variation in the use of words; i.e.: variation

in meaning: “a word is said to be used with

a transfer meaning” (Halliday 1985: 321) In

this sense, literal and metaphorical meanings

are adopted in traditional metaphor In the

area of ideational metaphor, Halliday (1985)

introduces two new terms namely

“congruent” and “incongruent” forms

applying to transitivity configurations and

can be analyzed in terms of the functional

structure of these configurations The

variation between the different expressions

of the same meaning is defined in terms of

* Department of English, College of Transport II, Viet

Nam,trinhtoeic@gmail.com

**

University of Foreign Language Studies

*** University of Da Nang, Viet Nam

“markedness”: certain forms can be recognized as unmarked expressions of the given meaning It is obvious that there is a shift in perspective from a focus of lexical variants to a focus on grammatical variants The concept of ideational metaphor is still quite new to the studies of the Vietnamese language In this paper, we address and interpret the constructions or structures and patterns of ideational metaphor as well as illustrate the grammatical variation between congruent and incongruent forms in behavioral clauses in English and Vietnamese We carefully examine the data selected in order to figure out the typical patterns of ideational metaphor and their congruent and incongruent modes in behavioral clauses in English and Vietnamese as well as its functional effects

on readers Furthermore, we make a

comparison of main types and shift patterns

of ideational metaphor in English behavioral

clauses with those of ideational metaphor in

Vietnamese behavioral clauses It is hoped

that these findings will enable us to better

understand ideational metaphor as well as

set a more standard form of behavioral

clauses analysis in English and Vietnamese

cases

1.1 Theoretical Background

Ideational grammatical metaphor, which

is the main topic of this paper, is also called

metaphor of transitivity Matthiessen and

Halliday (1997) give the following

definition:

“The ideational metafunction is

concerned with „ideation‟ that is

grammatical resources for construing our

experience of the world around us and inside

us One of its major grammatical systems is

TRANSITIVITY, the resource for construing our experience the flux of

„goings-on‟, as structural configurations; each consisting of a process, the participants involved in the process, and circumstances attendant on it.” (Matthiessen and Halliday, 1997: 11)

According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), unlike interpersonal metaphor, ideational metaphor is learned by children at the upper level and is not a part of daily life conversations In fact, it is associated with discourses of science The functional analysis of the two expressions is combined into a single diagram with a congruent and incongruent mode Let us take an example

of functional analysis of transitivity metaphor with congruent and incongruent variants offered by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:639):

Congruent

People most strongly believe that there is no

Senser Circumstance: manner Mental process Clause: projected

Incongruent

The strongest belief of all is that there is no

Value Relational process Token

It can be seen that the nominal group the

strongest belief of all can be interpreted as a

metaphorical variant of a mental clause with

the mental process believe In the

incongruent mode, the mental process is

nominalized as Thing and labeled as Value

What has occurred here is that the process of

believing has been realized metaphorically

as an entity serving as the Thing in a

nominal group It is worth pointing out that the most common form of ideational grammatical metaphor is nominalization, which will also be elaborated on later The semantic model suggests 13 types of ideational metaphor based on elemental semantic categories Halliday and Matthiessen (2000) theorize grammatical metaphor using the concept of the semantic

junction, which allows them to base their

categorization of grammatical metaphor in

relation to metaphorical shifts of elemental

classes

The highest in rank order in semantics is

a sequence, followed by figure and elements

of figures The elements of figures are

participant, process, circumstance, and

relator The above explanation states

that sequence is realized congruently by clause complex, and process (as a semantic

category) is realized congruently by a verb

in grammar Thus, according to the semantic

model, if sequence is realized by a clause or

if a noun realizes a process in grammar, then

the linguistic structure is called an ideational metaphor instance

Figure 1: Congruent mode of realization and metaphorical mode involving „downgrading‟

nexus

(Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 647)

Halliday's definition is taken up by

Ravelli (1985), in a thesis which explores

the role of grammatical metaphor in written

discourse, and which provides one of the

first attempts at categorizing types of

grammatical metaphor (Ravelli 1988) At

the heart of Ravelli's definitions are the

following: "[ ] one choice in the semantics may have two (or more) lexico-grammatical realizations" (1985: 3) and grammatical metaphor is "an alternative lexico-grammatical realization of a semantic choice" (1985: 55)

semantics

sequence figure figure

element lexicogrammar

clause clause

group

word

Figure 2: Grammatical metaphor interpreted as realization choice

s - semantic choice

c - congruent form

m - metaphorical form

(Ravelli 1985:104)

1.2 Some Previous Studies

Many researchers are keen on analyzing

functional grammar and the transitivity

metaphor in literary discourses Halliday

(1985) introduces transitivity metaphor and

classifies some complex types of these

metaphors The variation between the

different expressions of the same meaning is

defined in terms of markedness: certain

forms can be recognized as unmarked

expressions of the given meaning,

conforming to the "typical ways of saying

things" (Halliday 1985: 321) these forms are

the non-metaphorical variants, which are

called 'congruent' realizations

In "Grammatical metaphor: An initial

analysis", Ravelli (1988) presents a

framework for the study of ideational

metaphor She focuses on three main

aspects: general models explaining the

phenomenon of grammatical metaphor;

different types of ideational grammatical

metaphor and how they can be recognized

It is noted that a framework with a

systemic-functional representation of grammatical

metaphor taking into account a 'semantic' and lexicogrammatical level is proposed in this work Especially, it is suggested that a recognition of such textual effects is essential to an understanding of grammatical metaphor since it provides a functional explanation of the phenomenon

Derewianka (2003) discusses the ontogenetical development of the occurrence

of grammatical metaphor from childhood to adolescence To track the development, the researcher analyses his sons‟ use of grammatical metaphor in written texts from the age of 5 to 13 drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen (2000) The texts produced by the children were categorized according to the genre and complemented by observations, field notes, interviews and recordings of oral interaction during the production of written texts

Painter (2003) conducts a study to find out how native-English-speaking children develop their use of metaphorical meaning-making, based on Halliday‟s account Painter reached a conclusion that the first

important construction “Process^Range”

structures are commonly used in everyday

speech such as have a bath, have a

cuddle, etc Although these structures lose

their metaphorical meaning and are referred

to as „dead‟ or „faded‟ metaphor, they are

still important leading to the use of „living‟

or „bright‟ metaphor The children went on

to use embedded clauses following dead

metaphor The embedded clauses pave the

pathways to nominalization

There is a considerable number of works

exploring ideational metaphor, analyzing

and listing types and shift patterns of

ideational metaphor in English These above

studies focus on analyzing English

ideational metaphor on a large scale while

this study is devoted to an in-depth analysis

of ideational metaphor in English behavior

clauses Moreover, less attempt has been

made to find out and analyze types and shift

patterns of ideational metaphor in

Vietnamese behavioral clauses as well as

compare these types and shift patterns in the

two languages Therefore, this study is fairly

distinct from the previous works

2 Method

Qualitative and contrastive method were

adopted in this study because the attention

was paid to interpret types and shift patterns

of ideational metaphor in English and

Vietnamese behavioral clauses and compare

the types and shift patterns of ideational

metaphor between the two languages In

other words, we focus on analyzing and

making sense of English and Vietnamese

clauses rather than dealing with figures

within a population It is suggestive that the

qualitative method best suits our

requirements since in general, qualitative

study is inclined to the description of

phenomena Denzin and Lincoln (2000: 2)

state that qualitative research involves studying „things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them‟ This qualitative study is linked to in-depth exploration and analysis

of the ideational metaphor in behavioral clauses in English and Vietnamese Alongside with qualitative approach, contrastive analysis is used In other words, descriptive and comparative methods are exploited to make descriptions and comparisons of ideational metaphor in behavioral clauses in the two languages in order to determine the similarities and differences and find out the implications of such similarities and differences for language-related activities

2.1 Data collection

In this study, sampling is a crucial step and we make decision to adapt random sampling technique The selection of behavioral processes began with selecting verbs that realize behavioral processes offered by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Martin et al (1997), Thompson (2013), Eggins (1994) and Vietnamese behavioral processes offered by Lê Thị Hằng (2007), Tôn Nữ Bảo Khoa (2009) Hoàng Văn Vân (2012), and Phan Văn Hòa

& Nguyễn Thị Tú Trinh (2015) as well as from Oxford online English dictionary and Vietnamese dictionary (Hoàng Phê et al 2003) After building up our English and Vietnamese behavioral raw lists, we adopt bottom-up approach to recognize behavioral clauses in English and Vietnamese Wordsmith 5.0 and Navigation pane in Word documents and PDF are used as powerful tools to select the behavioral clauses Concord function in Wordsmith 5.0

is exploited to collect the English (behavioral) clauses while Search engine is

used to pick up the Vietnamese (behavioral)

clauses since Wordsmith 5.0 is not

applicable to Vietnamese texts There are

two main reasons for choosing Wordsmith

5.0 and Navigation pane First, the above

novels and short stories are already available

in electronic documents so it is

advantageous and time-saving for us to

process them Second, after the data

processing, 165 behavioral clauses in 9 short

stories and novels in English and

Vietnamese from the 19th century to present

are collected We make decision to carry out

the research in stories and novels but not in

other genres since stories and novels reflect

the reality through different lens of writers

and behavioral processes are commonly

used in narrative texts Therefore, they are

rich in examples of behavioral clauses and

we can explore more problematic cases of

behavioral clauses via verbal channel

2.2 Data analysis

In this paper, the collected data is

examined in the light of Halliday's general

view 'from above', with 'one meaning -

different realizations', as the underlying

framework of this paper Attention has been

paid to congruent forms with which the

incongruent or metaphorical forms can be

paired in agnation In addition, our

interpretation of ideational grammatical

metaphor is based on both structurally

according to rank with groups or phrases

and semantically according to ideational

metafunction with figures namely

participants, processes and circumstances

However, Ravelli (1999: 99) concludes that

“it is extremely difficult to capture any

descriptive generalizations about

grammatical metaphor at the level of

lexicogrammar", therefore we pay more

attention to the analysis of ideational

semantic In other words, the data is interpreted and classified in terms of typical patterns and rank shifts of ideational metaphor Last but not least, a functional explanation of the effects of ideational metaphor in texts is discussed and a contrastive analysis of ideational metaphor

in English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses is made

3 Findings and Discussion

3.1 Types of ideational metaphor in English and Vietnamese behavioral clauses

According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2000), the types of metaphor will be organized in terms of the metafunctional effect of the metaphor There are thus four major groups of experiential metaphor:

- Shift to thing

- Shift to quality

- Shift to process

- Shift to circumstance The three following patterns are frequent

in ideational grammar of behavioral clauses

in English and Vietnamese

3.1.1 A shift of behavior process to thing - range

PROCESS + RANGE construction: perhaps the most widespread use of a faded metaphor (Derewianka: 2003) is the Process + Range construction where what would be represented congruently as a process (e.g look) is represented metaphorically as the Range (e.g have a look) together with a lexical empty verb For example:

(1) She sighed a sigh of ineffable

satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full (Bronte 1847)

Table 1: English Process + Range constructions

Congruent wording (Verbs) Metaphorical wording (Verbal expressions)

Grimace

Moan

Shudder

Breathe

Smile

Shiver

Grin

Look

Stare

Groan

Sob

Sneeze

Kiss

Hug

Yell

yawn

Scream

View

Sigh

Cry

Embrace

Frown

Gasp

Make/ give a grimace Make a moan

Give a shudder Take a breath Give a smile Give a shiver Give a grin Have a look Give a stare Let out a groan Give a sob/ have a sob Give a sneeze

Give a kiss Give a hug Give a yell Give a yawn Let out a scream/ utter a scream Have a view

Utter a sigh Utter a cry/ utter a cry Give an embrace Make a frown Give a gasp

Let us consider the following examples:

(2) Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at

the words (Lawrence 1920)

(3) He caught little, short breath

(Lawrence 1920)

Congruently, (2) and (3) could be

rewritten something like:

(2a) Yet she grimaced slightly at the

words

(3a) He breathed hard

(2) chooses the Process + Range

construction of “give + a little grimace”

where the process “grimace” has now

become nouns accompanied by the lexically empty verb “give” (2) and (3) are agnated with (2a) and (3a) According to (Ravelli 1999: 77), “any metaphorical expression has

an agnate form which shows its congruent realization The rewording of a metaphorical expression into a congruent one is referred

to as unpacking "the grammatical metaphor” These examples could be regarded as cases of ideational grammatical metaphor Let us consider the following examples:

(4)

Congruent wording

Metaphorical wording

(4a)

(Lawrence 1920)

In (4a) process “smile” is nominalized

and functioned as Range – Behavior and the

lexically empty verb “put on” is chosen in

the metaphorical version In other words,

the behavioral process (to smile) are

formulated as Things (a smile) and the

consequential relationship between them is construed by the use of the word “put on” in (4a) Particularly, in these cases, there is a shift from behavioral processes to Participant - Range in behavioral clauses

Table 2: Rank of semantic shifts of the ideational metaphor of type 1

Behavioral process Range Verb Noun Groan  a groan

Grimace  a grimace Sob a sob

Sneezea sneeze Yell a yell Kiss a kiss Hug a hug Scream a scream

The keynote motif in the studies of

ideational metaphor is linked to the motif of

incongruence Generally speaking, there is

variation among types of expressions, some

realizations are congruent while others are

incongruent The concept of congruence is

often associated with the notion of

“markedness” (Halliday 1985) Congruent

expressions are typical and unmarked ways

of realizing a feature In other words, the

conception of ideational metaphor is

involved in the choice of wording Let us consider the following examples

(5) Mr Peggotty uttered no cry, and

shed no tear (Dickens 1849)

(6) Miss Spenlow immediately put her

hand to her frock, gave a sudden cry, and

ran to the dog (Dickens 1849)

(7) Then she made a frown and a gesture

to my mother (Dickens 1849)

Arguably, we have to recognize and

identify whether ideational metaphor occurs

in these examples First, we make a

congruent wording of (5) where the verb is

the process “utter” (5) can be rewritten “Mr

Peggotty didn‟t cry and shed any tear” The

fundamental feature of this construction as a

grammatical metaphor, in this case, is

Process → Range-Behavior However, it is

really difficult for us to clarify how far

ideational metaphor is treated as

conventional by the community in which it

occurs Thus, a discussion as to whether

something is metaphorical or not must

finally be the somewhat fruitless debate

about whether a given language community holds it to be

Other examples of PROCESS + RANGE construction

(8) And it is not so much the embrace

she gave me, that lives in my mind (Dickens

1849)

(9) Peggotty gave a gasp, as if she were

swallowing something that was very hard, and, putting out her hand (Dickens 1849)

In Vietnamese, when the nominalization

of Process appears, it tends to occur in PROCESS + RANGE construction, too In the data we find instances such as the following:

(10)

Congruent wording

Behaver Circumstance:

Time

Process:

behavioral

Circumstance:

Location

Process:

behavioral

Circumstance:

Location

(10a)

Metaphorical wording

nhìn

về phía chúng tôi

Behaver Circumstance:

Time

Process:

behavioral

Circumstance:

Location

Process:

behavioral

Range Circumstance:

Location (Nguyễn Thế Sơn 2015)

(11)

Congruent wording

Behaver Process: behavioral Circumstance:

Manner

Process: behavioral Circumstance: Location

(11a)

Metaphorical wording

gượng gạo

Behaver Process: behavioral Range Process: behavioral Circumstance: Location

(Cẩm thương 2011)

“Nở một nụ cười” and “dõi ánh nhìn” are

worthy of mention since they are

tremendously found in everyday spoken

language Here we consider them as

examples of faded ideational metaphor in

Vietnamese with the nominalization of the

behavioral processes “cười” and “nhìn”

According to Ravelli (1999), ideational

metaphor does not occur at the entire clause

but only parts of clauses Therefore,

ideational metaphor appears to be a feature

of the rank of group/phrase As to the recognition of ideational metaphor in (10) and (11), the critical difference between congruent and metaphorical ones is the choice of Process and Range It is the case when process meanings are metaphorically construed as Things and labeled as Range, this creates new possibilities for the ideational metaphor Table 3 illustrates some common metaphorical forms of behavioral clauses in Vietnamese

Table 3: Vietnamese Process + Range constructions

Congruent wording (Verbs) Metaphorical wording (Verbal expressions)

Cười (v)

Nhìn (v)

Hôn (v)

Ôm (v)

Nhảy (v)

Mơ

Thở

Uất ức

Nở một nụ cười Ném một cái nhìn/ trao nhau cái nhìn/ dõi ánh nhìn Trao một nụ hôn

Trao một cái ôm Nhảy một điệu nhảy

Mơ một giấc mơ Thở một hơi thở/ trút hơi thở Trút nỗi uất ức

It is argued that a recognition of such

communication effects is essential to an

understanding of grammatical metaphor,

since it provides a functional explanation of

the phenomenon Let us consider the

following example

(12)

Ðó là tôi, anh tôi, và cả đứa em út mới

học lớp ba Tôi đã chỉ tay tận mặt người đàn

bà:

- Bà đừng làm xáo trộn cuộc sống gia đình tôi Nếu không tôi sẽ không bao giờ để yên cho bà Tôi sẽ giết bà!

Người đàn bà ấy không nói gì, chỉ ném lại tôi một cái nhìn sắc lẹm (Nguyễn Thế

Sơn 2015) There appears a link between the use of ideational metaphor and humans‟ behavior

in a given context Looking at (12), “cái nhìn sắc lẹm”- human‟s behavior is metaphorically turned into a concrete thing