On Grammatical Metaphor As Exemplifying "The Boundaries Of Grammatical Description"

Bateman (1998: 3):

Similar arguments are brought with respect to Halliday’s notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ (cf. IFG: Chapter 10) as well as Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) standard work Cohesion in English.

Blogger Comments:

There are three serious shortcomings in Martin's argument that Bateman does not address here (or elsewhere).

1. Halliday's model of grammatical metaphor presupposes two levels of symbolic abstraction on the content plane, and is the main reason Halliday gives for stratifying content into semantics (meaning) and lexicogrammar (wording); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 237).  That is, the argument is not Martin's, and it does not justify a specifically discourse semantics.
2. Martin's argument uses misunderstandings of grammatical metaphor; see Misrepresenting Grammatical Metaphor.
3. Having raised grammatical metaphor as a motivation for a discourse semantic stratum, Martin does not go on to provide the congruent relations between strata by which to distinguish metaphorical (incongruent) relations.