Interpersonal metaphor revisited: identification,categorization, and syndrome

Grammatical metaphor (ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor as sub-categories) “leads to an expansion of the meaning potential: by creating new patterns of structural realization, it opens up new systemic domains of meaning”. Ideational metaphor has been extensively studied in terms of identification, categorization, and application. Interpersonal metaphor, though being readily applicable to interaction-oriented disciplines, has not been studied in depth and many issues remain to be tackled. One significant issue is how to identify interpersonal metaphor, metaphors of mood in particular. With instances from the CORP corpus built out of successful reply posts by doctors and nurses on the health forum of doctorslounge.com, we propose two principles (Context-first Principle and AS IF Principle) that can be used to identify both metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality. Categories of interpersonal metaphor and the metaphoric syndrome can thus be described in a consistent way.