When one describes one's feelings as 'up' or 'down' or when one describes oneself as ' fuming mad' or as ' bubbling with enthusiasm', one is using dead metaphors . Back to Index As you may know, a metaphor is a figure of speech . There are other figures of speech associated with metaphors that we may want to consider here, such as metonymy and synecdoche . A metonymy involves the association of one thing with another which often occurs with or near it. For example, when one says that one wants to be away from one's books for a while, it may indicate that one wants to keep away from one's studies for a while.
Synecdoche involves the substitution of a part for the whole, or the whole for a part.
For example, in the following, which is taken from the Graham Greene story 'The Basement Room', we have an example of synecdoche when we see the character Philip Lane viewing 'the legs going up and down beyond the railings', which indicates that he sees people rather than disembodied legs moving up and down beyond the railings, although the description here also indicates that his vision is limited to their legs rather than their whole bodies. The above example has a relationship to meronymy . In relation to hyponymy , we have an example of synecdoche when someone says, instead of ' John had gone into the room and drank the only bottle of Coke that I had', 'A living being had gone into the room and drank the only bottle of Coke that I had'. Back to Index Halliday 's approach to grammatical metaphor does help to highlight the fact that metaphors are more prevalent in language than is often assumed. As you may know, the term that Halliday uses in relation to grammatical constructions that are not metaphorical is congruence .