An Exploration Of Grammatical Metaphor In EST Discourses

Linguists advocate that science language should be conceived as the thinking activity to illustrate and reconstruct the world. Because of its high complexity and abstraction, English for Science and Technology (EST) often acts as an obstacle for the language learners in the process of English study. Therefore this thesis intends to explore the phenomena of grammatical metaphors in scientific discourses.Halliday first put forward the concept of "grammatical metaphor" in 1985 and initially classified it into ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor according to the three metafunctions. After more than ten years'development and improvement, Halliday prepossessed the notation of Grammatical Metaphor Syndrome (GMS), broke the dichotomy of grammatical metaphor, redefined and reclassified grammatical metaphor in 1996. He argued that grammatical metaphor includes all rank-shift and class-shift phenomena. He changed his classification criterion. Based on the extent of floating into the thinginess, he divided grammatical metaphor into 13 types. His new definition and classification of grammatical metaphor provide a powerful instrument and a unique method for scientific discourse analysis.Based on Hallidays'new definition and classification of grammatical metaphor, this thesis, by conducting a statistical analysis of distribution of 13 types of GM in 10 EST texts which are chosen at random, is intended to test and verify the applicability and feasibility of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory. According to the data analysis, the author found that besides nominalization, adjecitvization is also the most frequent type of grammatical metaphor. At the same time grammatical metaphor can pack the clauses into nominal groups so as to produce clauses with more succinct structures and abundant information, and give rise to the abstraction and complexity of discourse. Meanwhile they perform powerful cohesive function in the discourse. So in the writing of scientific discourse, the employment of grammatical metaphor should be emphasized to keep the formality and thechnicality of scientific discourse, maintain the authoritativeness of scientific language in the minds of the public on the one hand and strengthen the sense of belongingness of the scientists and their peers on the other, and compose coherent scientific discourses. While in the reading of scientific discourse, nominalization can be unpacked and restored, which will lower the difficulties and be very helpful to our understanding. Meanwhile it is of great importance and value to explore these GMs for us to have a better understanding of the nature of language at large, ultimately a more solid prediction of the trend of language development and even the law of human cognitive development.