ABSTRACT
The research issue explored in this paper evolved as a challenge to what cognitivist G. Lakoff alleges in his Moral Politics (2002 [1996]:11), that is,
that, fi rstly, conservatives and liberals misread one another due to confl icting moral systems, and that, secondly, these are expressed in what he calls ‘lexical metaphors’ which he claims are connected to the ‘strict father mentality’ and the ‘nurturant parent’ one. The thesis struck us as a dichotomy which, both epistemologically and linguistically, was just a bit too neat. In the fi rst place, it is an oversimplifi ed partition of the possibilities for political positioning typically taken up by socio-semiotically constructed ‘meaners’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999:610-11), and then, a too-circumscribed classifi cation of the potential linguistic resources systemically available to construe it. In short, lexical metaphor is hardly the whole story, or even the most relevant part of it. The focal point must be widened, as it is grammar (in the sense of lexicogrammar) that
creates the potential within which we act and enact our cultural being. This potential is at once enabling and constraining: that is, grammar makes meaning possible and also sets limits on what can be meant.
