The Adequacy of Grammatical Metaphor to Account for World Languages

This paper is concerned about the adequacy of the theory of Grammatical Metaphor to account for world languages by applying the theoretical framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. Grammatical Metaphor is an incongruent coding which involves a change on the lexico-grammatical structure of a clause. Grammatical Metaphor divides into Ideational Metaphor and Interpersonal Metaphor. Ideational Metaphor is an incongruent coding involving the changes on the form of transitivity structures and the type of clauses. Interpersonal Metaphor divides into Interpersonal Metaphor of Mood and Interpersonal Metaphor of Modality. Interpersonal Metaphor of Mood refers to incongruent use of the speech function in terms of the change or transference of mood. Interpersonal Metaphor of Modality involves changes in the modality used but this point is not covered in this study. The sources of data were derived from various discourses in three different languages: Indonesian, English and Arabic. The objective of the research is to reveal how much the theory of Grammatical Metaphor is adequate to be applied to analyze clauses in the three world languages. The result shows that the theory of Grammatical Metaphor covering Ideational Metaphor and Interpersonal Metaphor of Mood has proved successful and adequate to analyze various discourses adopted as samples in the three languages. This fact constitutes convincing evidence that Halliday's theory of Grammatical Metaphor is adequate to account for world languages.