Grammatical Metaphor In Scientific Discourse--A Comparative Study

Influenced by logical positivism, the philosophical trend of thinking prevalent in the western science culture, science is and should be described in terms of literal language, while scientific discourse, as a special genre of discourse, has long been regarded as the presentation of facts, and similar types of information with clear, unambiguous, precise and objective language. However, recent studies on metaphor issue a challenge to it, maintaining the metaphoricity of scientific discourse. Among the study of metaphoricity of scientific discourse, Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory achieves a lot. This thesis takes the perspective of systemic functional linguistics to explore the functions of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and English scientific discourse, with an attempt to discover similarities and dissimilarities between them.The historical review of the scientific discourse study in Part 2 falls into three parts. The first part describes and assesses the research in terms of stylistics. This traditional approach considers scientific discourse as a repository of scientific results or products, so their studies mainly center on the features of linguistic form, such as word choice and sentence pattern, with an attempt to facilitate translation, reading and writing of scientific discourse. The studies in this respect are effective in promoting the translation of scientific discourse, while ignoring the metaphoricity of scientific discourse. The second part gives a brief account of cognitive approach to scientific discourse. Traditionally, the relationship between metaphor and science has never been attended to in the study of metaphor. However, owing to the influence of logical relativism, the demise of logical positivism as well as the recognition of metaphor as one kind of cognitive means, we have seen some emerging interest in the metaphoricity of scientific discourse in the past two or three decades. Constructivists like Gertner, Boyd and Kuhn (1979, in Ortony, 1979 ) all argue to the effect that metaphor permeates all discourse, ordinary and special. Cognitive theorists, Lakoff and his colleagues demonstrate that metaphors are not something that occur only in the domains of poetry and art language, but are an indispensable part of other kinds ofdiscourse, professional or nonprofessional (In, Ortony, 1993). The pity is, however, that most of the theorists engaged in the study of the metaphoricity of scientific discourse, such as Lakoff and Boyd have only attended to the function of metaphor in the introduction or development of scientific terms^, 2000). Their studies have focused on the lexical level and stopped as such. The way of investigation is insightful, but suffers the defect of partiality. In the third part, the systemic functional approach to scientific discourse, particularly Halliday's grammatical metaphor, is introduced. Halliday's grammatical metaphor is devoted to the metaphoricity of scientific discourse in grammatical terms. He intends to deconstruct scientific discourse from linguistic perspective by applying grammatical metaphor theory to the study of scientific discourse.The revisit to grammatical metaphor theory in Part 3 is divided into 3 parts. The first part mainly focuses on the elucidation of grammatical metaphor theory basing on the distinction between lexical and grammatical metaphor, and Halliday's interpretation of the term "congruent". Halliday in his early writings considers lexical metaphor as "variation in the meaning of a given expression", while grammatical metaphor as "variation in the expression of a given meaning", and in 1996 he mentions this issue again and draws the distinction between them like this "Traditionally the term is applied only to lexical transformations and it is theorized as 'same signifier, different signified'...But I shall theorize these as 'same signified, different signifier' ". However, Halliday's definition of "congruent" is not as explicit as his distinction between lexical and grammatical metaphor. In his several writings he is de...