A Cognitive Approach To Grammatical Metaphor

The metaphor study has a very long history and the earliest interpretation of metaphor can be dated back into the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece. We argue that, among various metaphor theories, the cognitive views of metaphor held by cognitive linguists are most powerful in interpreting metaphors.Most of the previous metaphor study has been constrained to the metaphorical expressions at the lexical level of language, while the metaphorical expressions at its grammatical level have seldom been touched, though a few researchers have realized the existence of GM.Halliday's discussion of GM marks the real beginning of the GM study. His idea enriches metaphorical theories and provides us with a completely new realm of metaphor study. However, in Halliday's theory, there are certain inadequacies.This dissertation attempts to discuss GM from a cognitive perspective. Language is metaphorical in nature, and lexicon and grammar form a continuum of symbolic elements. Therefore, metaphors exist not only at the lexical level of language, but also at its grammatical level. Moreover, like lexical signs, grammatical signs are meaningful. When the original grammatical meanings carried by grammatical signs are no longer efficient in expressing new concepts or categories, it is GM that enlarges their grammatical meanings and enables language to adjust to the continuous development of human cognition. We tentatively hold that GM refers to the cross-domain mapping from the source domain to the target domain, during which process grammatical signs are endowed with new grammatical signifieds. Thus new grammatical meanings are formed.With Yi Zhongliang's theory of grammatical categories of English, we lay our stress on the grammatical metaphorizations in two grammatical categories: tense and aspect. In grammatical metaphorization of present tense, when the main meaning focus present-connectiveness carried by the grammatical token -0,-es/s is mapped from the domain of time into the domain of imagination, -0,-es/s, which originally contains the grammatical signified present-connectiveness in time, gains a new signified present-connectiveness in imagination. When the meaning focus remoteness carried by the grammatical token -ed of past tense is mapped into the domain of psychology and objective reality respectively, the grammatical signifieds of-edare extended from one (remoteness in time) to three: remoteness in time, remoteness in psychology and remoteness in objective reality. When the meaning process contained in the signified process of dynamicness, which is originally carried by the grammatical token be(a)+-ing of aspect, is mapped into the domain of stativeness and the domain of stance respectively, be(a)+-ing is endowed with two more new grammatical signifieds: process of stativeness and process of stance. Therefore, the grammatical meanings of these grammatical signs are greatly enriched. Our new viewpoints of GM can successfully interpret some language facts that cannot be well interpreted with previous theories.To sum up, based on the analysis and assessments of the previous study, this dissertation has discussed GM in a cognitive approach, which is a completely new attempt on the GM study.