Operationalizing grammatical metaphor

Abstract Nominal grammatical metaphor (NGM), as theorised within systemic functional linguistics (SFL), typically refers to cases where a process is ‘metaphorically’ encoded through nominal resources, rather than its typical encoding through the clause. Previous approaches to the study of NGM have generally relied on the concepts of agnation and congruence, but these concepts can be quite subjective in nature, leading to an unstable account of the phenomenon. This paper evaluates the theoretical status and methodological implementation of NGMs. Our aim is to consider whether Aktionsart can offer a means of operationalizing NGM. We analyzed 492 nouns from a random selection of 200 sentences in the PopSci register of the CroCo corpus. The nouns were analyzed separately by different coders in terms of (i) grammatical metaphor status and (ii) their ontological status combined with an analysis of Aktionsart. Our statistical analysis shows that adopting an Aktionsart approach provides a more nuanced and anchored methodology for the analysis of NGMs as it not only provides a more consistent and robust analysis, but it also enables us to specify subtypes of nominal grammatical metaphor based on their subtler semantic characteristics.