GRAMMATICAL AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR IN IDEATIONAL, INTERPERSONAL, AND TEXTUAL MEANING-MAKING: A CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST TEN CHAPTERS OF KHALIL GIBRAN'S ‘THE PROPHET’

Abstract

The present study examines the construction of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning in the first ten chapters of The Prophet (1923) by Khalil Gibran in terms of the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) of Halliday. In non-specialist literary criticism on Gibran, the term grammatical metaphor has been applied to any figurative and/or metaphorical language in Gibran's prose, but in this study the term is used in the technical sense by Halliday, namely in those contexts where a process or quality is re-coded, in nominalizing, as a noun (a real shift of grammatical class, as evidenced by congruent paraphrase). Like Lakoff and Johnson (1980), figurative expressions that map an abstract target domain (love, joy, the soul) onto a concrete source domain (a journey, a vessel, a bird) using ordinary lexical choice (no change in grammatical class) are classified as conceptual (lexical) metaphor. Interpersonal meaning is examined by means of mood and modality instead of "metaphor" and textural meaning is examined by means of Theme-Rheme structure and cohesion, instead of "textual metaphor. It is found that genuine grammatical metaphor occurs comparatively infrequently and is found only in a few nominalised abstractions (e.g., "the season of giving", "the hour of separation", "my eagerness") and conceptual metaphor is pervasive, carrying the bulk of the text's ideational and emotional content. Interpersonal meaning develops through a recurring pattern of grant-and-restrict modality and hedged imperatives, whereas the textual meaning is created when Theme is marked, parallelism is used, and there is also a contrastive cohesion that is not based on a systematic grammatical-class shift. The study maintains that this difference, not the undifferentiated concept of ‘grammatical metaphor', better explains Gibran's prose, which has an aphoristic, sermon-like style.