Slide 44: Interpersonal Metaphor

As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600) observe:

Interpersonal metaphors of mood and modality bring out the relationship between the two [metafunctions]: here interactants simultaneously both enact propositions and proposals interpersonally and construe this enacting in such a way that the ideational construal comes to stand as a metaphor for aspects of the interpersonal enactment.

The most obvious example of this is where the interpersonal feature of probability is realised experientially as a projecting figure of sensing, (realised in wording as the mental process clause ‘I think’, as exemplified by the following …