GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR IN POETRY

Abstract

 Halliday and Martin (1985, 1992) confirmed that grammatical metaphor is a resource for expressing meaning with the function of packing information, creating interpersonal links in communication and the coherence in text. With such features and functions, grammatical metaphors can appear in many different types of texts, including poetry. Poetry is a literary genre presented in the most concise form in terms of linguistic organizations, including rhyme and its own rules of arrangement in a highly artistic form. To investigate the characteristics and functions of grammatical metaphors in poetry, this study aims to identify and analyze the constitutive elements of ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor by modeling various types of grammatical metaphors appearing in poems “Doi mat sang nhin len” (Hoai Huong, 1966), “Que huong” (Giang Nam, 1960) and Nui Doi (Vu Cao, 1956). This article is an application of Systemic Functional Linguistics to the study of grammatical metaphor in Vietnamese poems with the hope of making a partial contribution to theoretical and practical aspects involved. The results of the study show that interpersonal grammar metaphors appear the most -17 times about 36%, ideational grammatical metaphors and textual grammatical metaphors have the same frequency -15 times, accounting for 32% of each type.