The Effects Of Grammatical Metaphor On Chinese Students' Comprehension Of English

The study of metaphor has started since two thousa nds years ago in Aristoltle's time.And the study can be roughly divided into two parts: the traditiona l school and thecontemporary school. In traditiona l school, metaphor was considered as a figure of speech,a rhetorica l device. The contemporary school can be said to origina te from the theory ofconceptual metaphor put forth by Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s, who study metaphor incognitive perspective.It can be easily found that most of the previous metaphor study has been focused onlyon the metaphorica l expressions at the lexical level of la nguage, and while those at thegramma tica l level have seldom been discussed until M.A.K Hallida y procla ims theexistence and significa nce of gramma tica l metaphor in his systematic study of la nguage infunctiona l perspective.Hallida y classifies gramma tica l metaphors into ideationa l and interpersona l metaphorscorrespond ing to the ideationa l function and interpersona l function of la nguage. However,he does not include textual metaphor in his treatment of gramma tica l metapor. Manylinguists after him believe in the existence of textual metaphor, which is based on thehypothesis that since la nguage has three meta functions, i.e. ideationa l function,interpersona l function and textual function, we have every reason to believe in the threekinds of gramma tica l metaphor. But the views about textual metaphor differ from one toanother among the linguists themselves.In this dissertation, ideationa l metaphor's influence on comprehension of English willbe discussed. The dissertation intends to find out whether it assists or hinders thecomprehension of the text, how it affects the comprehension and what kind of relationshipit is between the degree of metaphoricity and the comprehension of the text. In order toachieve these goals, two issues have to be solved theoretica lly: (1) how to determine thecongruent form of the la nguage; (2) how to set the criterion in the continuum between thecongruent and metaphorica l. Hallida y's study of gramma tica l metaphor in sema nticperspective helps to solve these problems and also support the whole dissertationtheoretica lly. A survey designed to detect the effects of ideationa l metaphor is carried outin the range of Jilin University and the results of the survey tell us the answers to thesequestions.This dissertation consists of 4 chapters. Chapter 1 is introduction . In chapter 2, we willgive a brief account on the releva nt theories emphasized on the introduction of Hallida y's ideationa l gramma tica l metaphor and introduce the way to set the degree of metaphoricity.Chapter 3 is about the survey designed to detect the effect of ideationa l metaphor oncognition. Chapter 4 is about the conclusion and implication of this study.