On Textual Metaphor

Many issues concerning textual metaphor are still under disputation. Those unsettled problems include the definition of textual metaphor; the exact relationship between textual, ideational and interpersonal metaphors; the differences between the meaning that congruent and metaphorical forms convey, etc. Fortunately, although Halliday does not admit overtly that textual metaphor is one type of grammatical metaphor, researchers who are interested in the topic have already agreed that besides ideational and interpersonal metaphors, textual metaphor should also be included in the grammatical metaphor system. Halliday himself has also dealt with some of the related issues, but he (Halliday, 1996) categorizes them under some other title. However, none of the researchers have ever made a wholistic and systematic account with regard to textual metaphor. Therefore, many puzzles still remain. In order to make clear at least some of those confusing questions, by collecting and making reference to the research findings already achieved by those prominent forerunners in the study of textual metaphor, some related subjects like the textual metafunction of language, and the findings in cognitive linguistics, the writer proposed some standards for distinguishing textual metaphor from their congruent expressions, and those marked ones. Then the writer managed to make classification of different types of textual metaphor by using the standards.However, the paper is a tentative experiment on the explanation of textual metaphor, and it does not solve all the problems. Matters such as relationship between the three components of grammatical metaphor and the relationship between metaphorical theme and information structure have to be solved through further research.