| Metaphor is a kind of language phenomenon pervasive in everyday life. Since the day it is put forward, much attention has been paid to it. The earliest research on metaphor can be traced back to as early as two thousand years ago, and linguists have been doing studies on it from different angles all the time. Along with the development of the study of metaphor, scholars of other fields and disciplines also show interest in this phenomenon and try to integrate metaphor study with other concepts so that studies on metaphor are gradually becoming cross-disciplinary. However those studies remain on the lexical level. Halliday (1985), the founder of functional grammar, for the first time formally puts forward the theory of grammatical metaphors in his book Introduction to Functional Grammar. According to Halliday, metaphor is a kind of language phenomenon which can be found both on the level of lexicon and on the level of grammar.This research is based on the theory of grammatical metaphors put forward by Halliday. The author first selects 20 texts from the textbook Naval English of Science and Technology (NEST) to establish a mini corpus, then analyzes the distribution of the 13 types of grammatical metaphors in the selected texts so as to investigating the functions of the application of grammatical metaphors in this corpus. This dissertation contains five parts.In the first part, the author introduces the background of the research, the purpose, the methodology and the structure of the dissertation.In the second part, the author first reviews studies on metaphor by different scholars, such as Aristotle, Plato and Richards. She then reviews previous studies on grammatical metaphors, including those by Halliday himself and by such scholars as Ravelli, Thompson, Zhu Yongsheng and Hu Zhuanglin.Part three is the theoretical framework. First of all, concepts such as language and realization, congruent and metaphorical patterns of realization will be introduced. Then we describe Halliday’s revised theory of grammatical metaphors, including the 13 types of grammatical metaphors. Finally on the basis of Halliday’s classification, the author categorizes grammatical metaphor into Nominalization, Adjectivisation, Verbalization and other types.Part four is the analysis based on the mini corpus. In the first place, the author gives a brief introduction to the collected texts. Secondly, we describe the distribution of each type of grammatical metaphors in detail. We then summarize the application of grammatical metaphors in current corpus. Type 2, Type 5, Type 13 and compound adjectives are most frequently found in this corpus. Therefore, in a sense, nominalization and adjectivisation appear more commonly than verbalization in the corpus. The final section is about the functions of grammatical metaphors in this corpus:to condense information structure, to achieve the objectivity and to keep formality of the texts.The last part is the conclusion. It points out the limitations in the current study and offers suggestions for future studies.Through analyses of the collected corpus, it is found that transference from verbs into nouns can avoid influences from tense, mood and modality which helps to keep the texts objective; shift of verbs into adjectives and the formation of compound adjectives contribute to the brevity of the texts by condensing the information; the usage of passive voices avoids the appearance of the participants which also help to keep the objectivity of the texts. Other types of grammatical metaphors also make contribution to brevity, objectivity and formality of the texts.NEST, as a technical textbook, has the features of brevity, objectivity and formality. After analyzing the textbook through grammatical metaphors, it can enhance understanding of the theory and meanwhile help to comprehend NEST. In addition, the theory of grammatical metaphors can not only be applied to improve writing ability but also can be used to enhance the readers’ reading ability. |
PDF Full Text Request