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An Exploration of Grammatical Metaphor in English Scientific Texts

Author: CuiXueFang
Tutor: GuoCui
School: Qingdao University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: grammatical metaphor (GM) nominalization adjectivization modifying nouns English scientific texts (EST)
CLC: H315
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 148
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Abstract

Grammatical Metaphor (GM) has been used substantially from ancient times, from the Middle Ages in particular. The study of GM has caught more and more attention of scholars, and has been becoming a hot topic in the field of linguistics both at home and abroad in recent years.As the founder of systematic-functional linguistics, Halliday firstly put forward the notion of "Grammatical Metaphor", and also made great achievements in this field. According to Halliday (1994), GM refers to a metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexico-grammatical form, which originally evolved to express a more congruent kind of meaning. Since Halliday put forward the notion of grammatical metaphor, many previous studies of grammatical metaphors (Halliday 1985,1993,1996,1997; Martin 1992,1993,1995; Hu Zhuanglin 1996,2000,2005; Zhu Yongsheng & Yan Shiqing 2000, 2001,2006; Zhu Yongsheng 2006) mostly found their bases on the initial classification of GM proposed by Halliday in 1985. Since Halliday himself reclassified GM into 13 types in 1996, this new classification should be applied to do some empirical research.This thesis selected at random 15 pieces of EST (EST) from an authoritative English technical journal, Science, by downloading from the internet, and a relevant book named The Practical Course of EST Translation as the research data, and explores the main types of GM in them. First of all, a brief introduction to historical development of grammatical metaphor, together with different scholars’viewpoints on it is introduced, followed by the summarized account of the features of EST. Then, the detailed analysis of main types of GM in EST are carried on, in which the quantitative analyses are used to get the distribution of main types of GM in EST, whose realizations and functions will be obtained by analyzing the sample sentences chosen from the collected data. Finally, through the discussion of the distribution and functions of GM in EST and the features of the EST, the relationship between the GM and the EST is concluded.The final findings of this research can be summarized into following three aspects. Firstly, the standpoint that the GM is widespread in EST supported by many previous scholars (Halliday 1993,1997; Halliday & Martin 1993, Dong Hongle 2005) is tested and verified. Secondly, this research finds that besides the nominalization, the adjectivization and modifying nouns are another two main realization forms of GM in EST. Studies on the nominalization has attracted a lot of scholars’attention, (Halliday 1997, Martin 1991, Shu Dingfang 2000, Zhu Yongsheng 2006, Fan Wenfang 2007) while the researches on the Adjectivization and modifying nouns are comparatively little, as another two main realization forms of grammatical metaphor, which also deserve scholars’further research so as to explore the formation mechanism of grammatical metaphor. Finally, it can be concluded that EST are featured by the universal of grammatical metaphor, which in turn contributes to construct the features of EST. The author hopes this research can provide a new angle to analyze EST and benefit the reader in reading as well as composing and translating EST.

An Exploration of Grammatical Metaphor in English Scientific Texts

Abstract

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