The paper explore"projection"from the perspective of ideational metaphor.Ideational metaph - or is one of the three
types of
grammatical metaphor in
Systemic - Functional Grammar(SFG),the other two being interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor(Thompson1996:163-176).According to Halliday(1994)and Thompson(1996),Grammatical metaphor refers to a metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexicogrammatical form,which originally evolved to express a more congru - ent kind of meaning.Just as"rammatical metaphors can be identified in terms of the metafunc - tions"(Huang2002a:35),grammatical metaphor in"Projection"can also be identified in terms of the metafunctions.In fact,in the three metafunctions:ideational metafunction,interpersonal meta - function,and textual metafunction,grammatical metaphor in"projection"works differently.Howev - er,because of the limited space,this research only focuses on the syntactic and semantic features of"projection"from the perspective of ideational metaphor.According to Halliday and Matthiessen(1999:48-49),a phenomenon is the most general ex - periential category:anything that can be construed as part of human experience.The phenomena of experience are of three orders of complexity:a single element,a figure,and a sequence.A figure and an element are congruently realized in the grammar by a clause and a group respectively,and a sequence is congruently realized by a clause complex.But a sequence may alternatively be realized by a clause and even a group,in which grammatical metaphor is involved,as it expands the seman - tic potential of the system.The ideational metaphor reflects a shift from sequence to figure,or from figure to participant,and thus falls into the ideational function,as its primary effect is ideational.The paper first introduces grammatical metaphor as well as its terms and its identifying fea - tures.Then the author discusses how the ideational metaphor works in some of the structures in the"projection"system.Ideational metaphor in some hypotactic projection clause nexuses can be iden - tified.Usually when one transitivity analysis does not seem to reflect adequately the state of affairs being referred to,it is very likely that the meaning is being expressed metaphorically.In this case,a parallel analysis is employed to interpret the state of affairs more closely and congruently.The meaning of the clause as being derived from the combination of the two readings can be reflected in the different analyses.In this respect the meaning of a clause is expressed fully by reading both ver - sions of the analysis.Finally,from the discussion and the analysis,this research concludes that this particular type of"projection",based on its syntactic and semantic features,possesses its own dis - tinctive features and principles that are different from the generally accepted rules in identifying grammatical metaphors.