A Syntactico-semantic Study Of The Non-finite-ing Clause As Grammatical Metaphor

This study approaches the non-finite-ing clause as grammatical metaphor(GM) within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG). By referring to the functional semantic features and the syntactic patterns of the non-finite-ing clause as GM to identify this type of clause in the corpus, it aims to reveal the syntactico-semantic representations of the non-finite-ing clause as GM, present the functional distributions of the non-finite-ing clause as GM in academic genre from both the macro perspective and the micro perspective, and clarify the relations between the the syntactico-semantic representation of non-finite-ing clause as GM and its functional distribution in the corpus of academic writings.The data used in this study come from a one-million-word self-built corpus of academic writings. Adopting the corpus-based approach and the functional analysis of the non-finite-ing clauses as GM, 453 actual instances in this corpus have been manually singled out to be the samples of non-finite-ing clause as GM in this study.This thesis has first tried to build up the syntactico-semantic models to identify the non-finite-ing clause as GM with the combination of the corpus-based approach and functional semantic analysis. With the aid of the authentic data, it has described the four syntactic patterns and defined three logico-semantic functions of the non-finite-ing clause as GM. It has shown that each of the syntactic patterns has realized mainly one of the logico-semantic functions of the non-finite-ing clause as GM, and the three logico-semantic functions of the non-finite-ing clause as GM realized in these four syntactic patterns have improved the cohesion and coherence of the academic writings. Moreover, the textual functions of the academic genre have been realized by the functional distributions of the non-finite-ing clause as GM.The present study is significant in the following three aspects. Firstly, it can shed some light for college English teachers on how to improve their teaching in academic writing.Secondly, it can be a reference for the linguists from different schools to study the non-finite clause or the grammatical metaphor from other perspectives using this corpus that consists of the academic writings. Thirdly, it has provided a methodology to make a study of some syntactic or semantic units in different genres.