A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese Legislative Texts And Translation Strategies

As a common and complex linguistic phenomenon, metaphors have long been studied from various perspectives, particularly lexicology. Over the past couple of decades, functional grammar has provided a new insight into the study of metaphors so that metaphors are currently considered not merely as a lexical phenomenon but also a grammatical one.Based on previous studies of metaphors, systemic-functionalist Halliday proposed the concept of grammatical metaphor in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in1985. Grammatical metaphor (hereinafter referred to as GM), as a significant part of metaphor, plays an indispensible role in metaphor study and also serves as an essential part of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar theory. Many scholars at home and abroad apply this theory to the analysis of various discourses, especially scientific discourse analysis and news discourse analysis. This thesis attempts to take English legal language as the main target, aiming to verify the universality of GM from Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory perspective. In addition, it attempts to explore the similarities and differences of GM in between English and Chinese legislative texts for the purpose of revealing their linguistic features. The current study also makes an active study for the translation strategies of GM mentioned in English legislative text.According to the objective noted above, this thesis explores three major questions as follows:the types, frequency and distribution of GM in English legislative text; the similarities and differences of GM between English and Chinese legislative texts; and the mismatch between semantic level and lexico-grammatical level that causes translation difficulties and applicable translation strategies aimed at achieving effective conversion at the lexico-grammatical level.A representative English and Chinese legislative texts are selected for the study object and a corpus is established for data analysis. This research mainly adopts a qualitative research approach accompanied by the quantitative method. In terms of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory, the author initially adopts Halliday’s13types of ideational metaphor to identify GM and analyze the types and frequencies of GM by using Microconcord software, and then makes an overall analysis of GM and its translation strategies through the demonstration and explanation of instances.This thesis draws the following conclusions:1. The grammatical metaphor can be found in English legislative text. These may include nominalization, adjectivization, prepostionalization and verbalization. The wide application of GMs has increased the complexity of legislative language. The metaphorical modes of expression embody an important stylistic feature of English legislative language. 2. Among all types of ideational metaphor classified from the transference in grammatical class, nominalization ranks first and it is the most powerful resource of creating ideational grammatical metaphor;3. A contrastive analysis indicates that GMs in English and Chinese legislative texts are strikingly similar not only in types but also in functions. The forms of GM mainly include nominalization and adjectivization. They both are packaged by downgrading with the aim to make the legislative language more objective, concise and precise. In addition, the metaphorical modes of expression help realize the ideational, impersonal and textual meta-functions of the legislative language. Owing to different grammatical system and culture however, GMs in English and Chinese legislative texts differ in realizations because the English language is an inflectional language with rich affixes. Different types of affixes can be added to a word and be transformed into other parts of speech, while the Chinese language lacks inflectional change and there is only change of syntactic function rather than the morphological change when a Chinese verb or adjective functions as an entity or quality;4. The mismatch between semantic level and lexico-grammatical level causes translation difficulties in English legislative text. Only by analyzing and understanding the source text correctly can the right translation be achieved. Unpacking GM or grammatical demetaphorization is operated in the process of understanding, while in reconstruction, information unpacking and grammatical demetaphorization is reorganized into Chinese according to the principle of adjusting clause order.GM not only plays an important role in the construction of legislative style, but also provides an important theoretical basis for the application of translation strategies. It is hoped that the present study has some positive significance and important values for understanding the stylistic feature of legislative text as well as the relationship between grammatical metaphor and legislative text. Moreover, it is hoped that the analysis of the phenomena of GM and defining the mechanism and functions of GM in legislative texts may offer some new insight into the nature of metaphor and its cognitive value.