Study On Stylistic Value Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor In Classic English Prose

Grammatical metaphor (GM), a notion initiated by Halliday in 1985, is an important component of systemic functional grammar. Over the years, it has witnessed rapid development in both theoretical study and empirical application. The significance of the theory has been acknowledged by more and more linguistics at home and abroad. Grammatical metaphor is generally regarded as an alternative approach to metaphor in complementation with the traditional lexical metaphor-it is metaphor that occurs at the grammatical level. According to the three metafunctions of language in systemic functional grammar, grammatical metaphor is classified into three kinds:ideational GM, interpersonal GM and textual GM. Ideational GM (hereafter referred to as ideational metaphor) is concerned with the construal of meaning within the transitivity system and is the most prominent one among the three.The study takes English prose as the target genre and the classic ones of modern English prose as research sample. And the research is an attempt to find out the mechanism of formation and function of ideational metaphor in English prose from a systemic functional perspective and its effect on the language style of English prose as a distinctive type of discourse. After a brief review of related theories and key concepts, the study presents the statistical results of an empirical examination of a randomly selected sample of classic English prose, which reveals the distribution pattern of ideational metaphor in the sample. A revised version of Ravelli’s classification of ideational metaphor is adopted as the theoretical criteria for data collection. In accordance with the classification, the statistical result proves that nominalization is the dominant form of ideational metaphor, and that verbalization, adjectivization and embedded clause occurs at a relatively low frequency. Therefore, the thesis focuses on the detailed analysis of nominalization within the framework of systemic functional grammar to reveal its characteristics in English prose first and then explore its function in English prose based on a comparative analysis of the metaphorical and congruent forms in terms of meaning construction. The thesis goes on to have a tentative discussion on the stylistic value of ideational metaphor in prose in light of the purpose of writing, degree of formality, the relationship between language and cognition, aesthetic objectives, and other distinctive features. In spite of their minimal role played in prose, the other three minor types of ideational metaphor are also discussed in terms of their usage and function in meaning construction in order to have a complete understanding of ideational metaphor’s mechanism of formation and function.The findings of the thesis suggest that the use of ideational metaphor is in connection with the type of discourse, that ideational metaphor is an effective grammatical device for prose writers to achieve their purpose of writing and features of literary language. Hopefully the analysis in present study can help reveal the generic features of English prose, and being aware of ideational metaphor may help readers better appreciate classic English prose by unveiling meanings expressed implicitly by ideational metaphor.