Grammatical Metaphor In Literary Works And Their Simplified Versions

For those less advanced language learners,simplified versions of literary works play an important role in escalating their language competence in reading.Different usages and distributions of grammatical metaphor in the original work and its simplified version,to a large extent,determine their varieties of the readability.Therefore,scrutinizing grammatical metaphors in literary works and their simplified versions will be valuable not only for the theoretical application of grammatical metaphor but also for rewriting and pedagogical practices for Chinese learners of English as second/foreign language.By examining Chapter 2 of the original version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and its English simplified versions rewritten respectively for native speakers and Chinese learners from the systemic functional linguistic perspective of grammatical metaphor,this thesis purports to address the following questions:(1)What are the characteristics of frequency,major approaches and rank-shifting of grammatical metaphors in the three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles?(2)What are the exact characteristics of the transferences or maintenances of the original grammatical metaphors in two simplified versions?(3)What implications of rewriting and pedagogy can be sought from these differentiations of the distributions of grammatical metaphor?Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the original version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and its simplified versions respectively for native English speakers and Chinese learners of English as second/foreign language,the major findings can be summarized as follows:(1)The original version is the most grammatically metaphorical,followed by the simplified version for native speakers and then the simplified version for Chinese learners.More ideational metaphors are employed in the simplified version for native speakers than in the simplified version for Chinese learners and these two simplified versions share slight differences in the occurrence and distribution patterns of interpersonal and textual metaphors.Nominalization serves as the most powerful resources for creating ideational metaphors in the three versions,among which there exist a number of transcategorization from verbs to nouns,nearly remaining unchanged in simplified versions.Metaphor of modality,especially in probability and obligation,are the major approaches of shaping interpersonal metaphors.The strategies of text-reference and mate-message relation are adopted more for textual metaphors in the simplified version for Chinese learners.In terms of ideational metaphor,the rank-shifting goes in a down-up way from the original version to the simplified version for native speakers or the simplified version for Chinese learners.The version for Chinese learners usually has the highest rank.However,there is merely no rank-shifting in interpersonal metaphor.(2)The version for native speakers retains more of the original grammatical structure and chooses the obscure words substituted while the rewriter of the version for Chinese speakers has the preference for omitting the ideationally metaphorical cases,adding interpersonal and textual metaphors and rearranging the grammatical structure.(3)As can be learned from these findings,it would be conducive to the rewriting of reading materials if adapters are capable of strategies of dealing with different types of grammatical metaphor and lowering the difficulty of construing experience in ideational metaphor.Also,Some pedagogical implications can be sought from these findings like the distributions of grammatical metaphor viewed as a measurement of selecting proper simplified versions,practices of departing and combining clauses,emphasis on nominalization as well as more focuses on ‘it’ and ‘wh-’ structure.