| The frequency of grammatical metaphor in texts is positively correlated with the density of the text information.Therefore,the texts with grammatical metaphors require readers to make more cognitive efforts to “unpack” the information.English textbooks are the main way for students to obtain the language input.Research on textbooks has been done from many different perspectives.However,it is a pity that there are few research discussing about the grammatical metaphor in English textbooks,which is a new study area to explore.Therefore,based on this situation,this thesis is carried out to further study the distribution of grammatical metaphor and its types category in senior English textbooks.In those textbooks,grammatical metaphor occurs more frequently due to the rising development of student’s reading ability and the increasing level of difficulty of lexico-grammar where lexical items represent the joint semantic meanings brought by grammatical metaphors.The three research questions are put forward in this thesis as followings:（1）What are the overall distribution characteristics of grammatical metaphors in senior English textbooks of Grade 1 and Grade 2?（2）What are the similarities and differences between Senior One and Senior Two English textbooks in terms of grammatical metaphor?（3）What reasons can account for those similarities and differences in senior English textbooks?Guided by Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory,this thesis is carried out with the text analysis method with UAM corpus tool.The study analyzed all the reading texts in the first-two-year senior English textbooks,newly published by People’s Education Press in 2019.All the textbooks have been examined as combinations of two grade levels respectively.After investigating the mean number of grammatical metaphor and the distribution characteristics of four integrated types categorization with UAM corpus tool,this thesis uses SPSS tool to see whether there exists significant difference and tries to find similarities between two-grade English textbooks,then explores the reasons for those similarities and differences.The study finds that:（1）Overall,the mean of grammatical metaphors in Senior Two textbooks is higher than those in Senior One,which is consistent with the development of students’ cognition level.Therefore,students in Senior Two face more grammatical metaphors and more text complexity than students in Senior One in the use of English textbooks.（2）As for the similarities: all the four integrated grammatical metaphor types categorization distribute in Senior One and Senior Two English textbooks.In addition,Nominalization is the most popularly used grammatical metaphor types category in both two grade textbooks.Besides,type 2（Verb to Noun）has the largest proportion,followed by type 6（Adverb/Prepostional Phrase to Adjective）and they are usually matched with each other in a complex clause,which could be commonly seen both in Senior One and Senior Two English textbooks.（3）As for the differences: According to Levene’s test for equality of variances,Nominalization categorization in senior English textbooks has the significant changes between different grades（P=0.024<0.05）.There are no significant changes in Adjectivization,Verbalization and Circumstancialization distribution,but they do present a rising trend in grammatical metaphor numbers.（4）According to the findings above,the reason that could account for the similarities is the increasing text complexity in which the lexical density and the grammatical structure is highly compact and the metaphorical realizations are being rich.As for the reason of differences: the functions of Nominalization in the objectification of expression and the concentration of information in the texts with written style are the main reasons for the difference in the distribution of grammatical metaphors between grade one and grade two.The main implications are as follows:（1）Teachers should help students develop their grammatical metaphor ability to improve their English reading skills.（2）Teachers need to make adequate preparations in effective teaching methods for the highly frequently used grammatical metaphor types.（3）Textbook compilers should pay more attention to grammatical metaphors in English textbooks in the future.This study attempts to provide English learners and educators with a new way of thinking about English learning and teaching and to realize the importance of grammatical metaphor in the development of students’ English reading ability. |
