Grammatical Metaphor In EST And Translation Approaches

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 (GM) theory in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar.It has been two decades since the grammatical metaphor theory was proposed. Over this period, the theory has undergone much development and won more recognition. However, when English for Science and Technology (EST) is analyzed, most scholars still don't use grammatical metaphor as often as lexical metaphor.The thesis is an attempt to study grammatical metaphor within the framework of systemic-function linguistics. After a brief review of the study of GM and EST, this thesis concerns on the study of nominalization and the other phenomenon'verbalization'. This thesis, by conducting a statistical analysis of grammatical metaphor in 10 scientific news discourse which are chosen from Xinhua News Agency, is intended to discuss the frequency,functions and classification of nominalization and verbalization.In terms of translation, we apply a famous translation theory --- Nida's translation model"analysis","transfer"and"restructuring"to observe how nominalization and verbalization in the English source text are transferred in the Chinese target text in my database. After the review of former translation theories about GM in EST, we find that they usually use the literary translation, free translation and the combination of the two translations. However, all these can not reflect the characteristics of the GM in EST. We hope that the study of this thesis can throw some new light on the research of GM in EST.The present thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter mainly focuses on the origin, necessity and significance as well as objectives of the study. The second chapter is a literature review. In this chapter, the status of EST at home and abroad is presented and the definition and classification are also elaborated on. The third chapter mainly concerns the theoretical framework, including different approaches to grammatical metaphor, Nida's translation theory and my research hypothesis. Chapter Four and Five are the core of this thesis, which focuses on the results of the statistical analysis and the application of the translation approach. In Chapter Six, the major findings and implications of the study are concluded and limitations of the study are pointed out, then the suggestions for further research are proposed as well.