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.