A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese Popular Science Discourse

With the aim to popularize scientific knowledge,popular science discourse needs to ensure the readability of the text and the accuracy of the language at the same time,so the language expressions of it are worthy of study.Since first proposed in Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar(1985),Grammatical Metaphor(abbreviated as GM hereinafter)has taken the central position in discourse analysis.Regretfully,most of the existing researches focus on the application of GM to the analysis of scientific discourse,literary discourse,political discourse,etc.and deal only with English discourse.Little attention has been paid to popular science discourse,especially Chinese one.Therefore,the thesis chooses the respective representatives of English and Chinese popular science discourse Encyclopedia Britannica(abbreviated as EB hereinafter)and Encyclopedia of China(abbreviated as EC hereinafter)as the research objects and contrastively analyzes GM in EB and EC in order to present the language features of English and Chinese popular science discourse and to justify the universality of GM in the meantimeGrounded on Halliday’s reclassified thirteen types of GM,the thesis carries out a contrastive analysis of GM in EB and EC by adopting both quantitative and qualitative research methods.The thesis first presents four criteria to identify GM,through which data is processed and classified.After that,by displaying the general distribution of GM in EB and EC,the thesis summarizes the similarities and differences of GM distribution from the aspects of distribution frequency,internal structure,co-occurence and so forth.Finally,to explore the reasons behind the similarities and differences,the thesis analyzes GM in EB and EC from such aspects as the functions of GM,language evolution,features of English and Chinese languages,and different modes of thinking in the West and in ChinaThe results suggest that GM is abundantly distributed in both EB and EC Among all the thirteen types of GM,nominalization and adjectivization are the more widely-used subtypes due to the specific functions they perform in constructing the texts.On account of the visualization and dynamics of language evolution,some metaphorization other than the thirteen types of GM classified by Halliday is also found in the two encyclopedias.Besides,owing to different language features and thinking patterns in diverse cultures,EB uses more nominalization while EC uses more adjectivization,which further results in the different co-occurrence in EB and EC.What is more,as prepositions and conjunctions in Chinese can perform different grammatical functions without changing their forms,EC has more types of GM than EB.Through a contrastive analysis of GM in EB and EC,the research not only displays the stylistic features of English and Chinese popular science discourse,broadening the application scope of GM in discourse analysis,but also reflects the features of English and Chinese languages and more significantly,reveals the existence of some other types of GM.