The instances above demonstrate a developmental path toward mastering grammatical metaphor. The Year 7 student has produced a congruent realisation of a sequence, a clause complex, but moved towards the grammatical metaphor of adult language by using an anaphoric reference item (that) as Token of the primary clause. The next step is to replace the reference item with the referent, thereby creating a metaphorical clause simplex in which an act is decoded by reference to a fact:
The verb mean can serve as the 'sign' subtype of intensive identifying process, like indicate, suggest, imply, show, betoken, mark, reflect, or as the 'symbol' subtype, like express, signify, realise, spell, stand for (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 269). Here it serves as as the 'sign' subtype.
