GM language

( Thanks for all your amazing comments)

– this one’s for you, ‘Flavio’ - you only need to understand the secret in your name.

I wonder if Meta is ‘fluent’ in English by now; that is, she speaks and writes English ‘fluently’. When she was a little girl, no one in their right mind would have mentioned GM language to her, but instead would have told her a funny story so that she would learn intuitively. We were at the time of dialogue pedagogies – where you strive to become one with your environment by means of interaction and dialogue and, thus, like ‘a fish in water’ negotiate your passage in the river of life using words to do it. It is no wonder that Copenhagen, where I met Meta, is symbolised by the little mermaid and, thus, children’s stories.

Know the story of The Owl and the Pussycat?

Oh, and now out with the puppets for your performance.

Hey, that’s not me, with a voice like that! Here, I am.

Yes, and that is where the story should have ended, but the teaching establishment – as you know - never understands when enough is enough.

And so after studying the text profusely, this is the result some years later....

Anyway, you breathe a sigh of relief that this is never going to happen to you – and probably spell ‘breathe’ as ‘breath’ – if you haven’t discover where all this is leading.

I confess there were parts I liked in the analysis of the text, such as how the owl would look today:

“The Owl is a proto-rock star, winning his way into the Pussy-cat's heart with the help of a "small guitar.”

Paul McCartney understood when he did it his way:

"All my loving, I will send to you ----oooo!"

But the key that makes all this possible is not stated explicitly. Meta understood, Paul did, too, but they probably never put a name to it. They just used it intuitively. Yes, it is called metaphor – a special type of metaphor defined as ‘grammatical metaphor’.

Meta knew enough to recite the important part of the story:

'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love:
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Here, you witness a dynamic changing concept, altering its form, crossing over from one grammatical category to another.

‘Lovely’ becomes ‘love’ and ‘YOU’!

– child’s play and not even worth mentioning?

And Paul’s sang that ‘to love’, you ‘send’ all your ‘loving’ to someone

– shifting a feeling into an action

Here is a formal description of this phenomenon (take a deep breath):

Grammatical metaphors are created through the grammatical process of 'derivation' by which a verb or an adjective is converted into a noun, often by adding an ending to the verb or adjective. (Many of the noun suffixes we discussed earlier are used in the process of derivation.)

John acts silly. (verb)

John's actions are silly. (noun created by derivation=grammatical metaphor)

Grammatical metaphors are one hallmark of written English. They occur quite commonly in all varieties of written English, from the informal varieties of take a bath (Halliday 1985) to the formal varieties found in scientific and technical writing (Kies 1985a).

Looks easy so far (take an even deeper lungful of air):

A meaning may be realized by a prototypical, unmarked construction or by a so-called grammatical metaphor. The former is referred to as a congruent construction as it is the most typical and straightforward way in which experience is construed (Halliday, 1985: 343). Grammatical metaphor, a notion derived from Systemic Functional Grammar, subsumes a number of non-congruent structures which result from paradigmatic and/or syntagmatic shift between functional categories in the lexico-grammar, by which, for instance, properties (congruently worded as adjectives) are reworded as nouns. In the following examples, processes (congruently worded as verbs) are metaphorically coded as participants: 1. Simon's decision to ignore his doctor's advice of immediate hospitalisation was a sign of irresponsible behaviour. "Even though the metaphorical mode of construal often displays a loss of information, omitting certain features from the congruent wording, it also adds semantic features and brings about communicative effects that cannot be realised in congruent constructions.

If you are still alive, an explanation for this goes like this:

Once we can identify our experiences as entities or substances, we can refer to them, categorize them, and quantify them – and, by this means, reason about them ... see .... cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps even believe that we understand ... (Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By, pages 25/6)

And so we flip between grammatical categories to do so. To be loved, be loveable and stop, right?

'Fall in or fall out', I say.

Tapestry of Life

(Thank you for your interesting comments on my first post. Here are a few more of my own: )

Have you ever thought how 'time' is a metaphor? Time is on my side, we hear in a song, but tend to believe something quite different. Time is a substance that is limited. It will run out. Sometimes, we even believe we have too much of it and ‘kill’ it. We squander it or just waste it and feel defeated and frustrated. But what if you think of it as an unfolding eternal process – it is as though a VIP carpet is being stretched out in front of you, isn’t it? Now, we understand the song line, ‘Time is on our side’ – it all seems to be 'working out' wonderfully.

And then there are static or dead metaphors, ones that don’t work anymore. The ideas they incorporate seem to have died, like a representation in a tapestry from a bygone time. The metaphor no longer lives and we cannot live by it. However, what if you just breathe life into it - Look: The ‘Portuguese discoveries’ of yesteryear become an unfolding epic adventure of scientific research – symbolised by Champalimaud building! And miraculously this metaphor lives again...

But there are those amongst us who have lost the courage to realise dreams, to use metaphor to create the life they might dream up, a dream come true. I met a student like that and pleaded with her:

‘If you do nothing, you are at the mercy of everything and everyone!

My very good friend Valerie who understands time and life like no one else – she is 94 – sent the student a wonderful reply, which she quoted by heart:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

(He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by William Butler Yeats)

And so, by treading softly, you will be encouraged to come to understand just how wonderful our visions of the world are and how they may yet 'unravel' at your feet.

'Walk' your talk, I say...

Well, I believe that metaphor is the key to creativity and finding solutions in a world that, at times, seems unable to find them.

Gregory Bateson put it like this:

"Logic is a very elegant tool," he [Gregory Bateson] said, "and we've got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation" -- his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking out over the ocean -- "you know, to all those pretty things" -- and now, looking straight at me [Capra] -- "logic won't quite do ... because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes." ...

He stopped again, and at that moment I suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been interested in for a long time. I got very excited and said with a provocative smile: "Heraclitus knew that! ... And so did Lao Tzu."

"Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over there. Logic won't do for them."

"So what do they use instead?"

"Metaphor."

"Metaphor?"

"Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive."

Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with remarkable people (1988) Bantam, New York [page 76-77]

This notion is further supported by George Lakoff in his books, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In The Flesh. What he says is that thinking is an integral part of our body and its relationship with the environment and that objective, value free thought is something of a myth. Hence, if I feel 'on top' of the world or, conversely 'down', this makes sense in terms of the basic orientation of the body and our state of being. And so we have embodied philosophy.

We use many metaphors quite unconsciously, such as seeing argument in terms of war, which is quite 'indefensible' as 'attacking' each other will only lead to 'wiping out' the human race if you get my 'point'!

Now, some metaphors are relatively fixed, but high-level ones can be framed to reflect action from a certain perspective. 'Surgical' strikes by military planes are presented as part of an 'operation' associated with maintaining 'health and life' rather than destroying it.

So, in a nutshell, we manipulate metaphors unconsciously, on the one hand, and with great awareness to expand and add to thought, on the other. A story is simply an extended metaphor, like those related to creation of life itself. Look at this painting and its interpretation, which could so easily depict Meta for Dialogue! (lots more re-presentations there to look at)

And so from the beginning of time, let's look at something very recent: your subconscious is your body.:

"The cellular level, where emotions are instigated, is also where unexpressed emotions are stored. The catharsis of illness expresses the sudden, overwhelming release of information that has been trapped in our bodies. What Freud termed the 'subconscious' mind is actually a measurable physical process. In other words, there is no 'mind-body problem'. Your body is your subconscious mind."

And so we find that thinking with your feet and other parts of your body is a powerful way of 'understanding' in a world that is bent on educating us out of our creativity.

'Thumbs up' for the future, I say!