A Systemic-Functional Study Of Grammatical Metaphor

Metaphor is by no means a new topic. Yet, for a very long time, metaphor has exclusively referred to lexical metaphor, as it is taken for granted that metaphor, as a phenomenon of meaning, has nothing to do with grammar. However, Halliday sees it differently. He contends that lexical selection is just one aspect of lexicogrammatical selection; and that metaphorical variation is lexicogrammatical rather than simply lexical. Such a stand on language leads him to put forward his grammatical metaphor theory in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar.It has been two decades since the proposal of the grammatical metaphor theory. Over this period, the theory has undergone much development and won more recognition. Yet some people are still holding doubts about this theory. So I think it is necessary to make a systematic and comprehensive study of grammatical metaphor, to review the development of the theory itself and to prove the rationality of the theory.The thesis is an attempt to study grammatical metaphor within the framework of systemic-functional linguistics. After a brief review of the study of metaphor and grammatical metaphor, the thesis centers on the definition of grammatical metaphor, its ontology in theory and reality, the different forms of grammatical metaphors and their functions, as well as its complementarity with lexical metaphor.The relations between grammatical metaphor and discourse types are also explored, with a conclusion that grammatical metaphor is usually related with scientific and formal writings as grammatical metaphor renders a sense of objectivity and authority. The cognitive approach to metaphor study is also touched upon, as both grammatical metaphor and lexical metaphor involve cross-domain mapping.