Cognitive Perspective On Grammatical Metaphor

From the sixties of the 20th century, significant linguistics belonging to different schools had paid attention to metaphorical problems. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the theory of cognitive metaphors. From then on, metaphor has become the hot cake in linguistic studies. M.A.K.Halliday came up with his theory of grammatical metaphor (later the shortened form GM for convenience) in such academic atmosphere and elucidated GM systematically in great detail from the perspective of systematical grammatical metaphor. He greatly enriched the theory and presented a completely new angle but unsatisfying points still exists, especially his unclear and inefficient interpretation of the important concept "congruent", which is of great importance to the understanding of grammaticalThe thesis made an attempt to explore the conception'congruent'cognitively and further unpack the nature of GM. And gradually the exploration of the three kinds of GM: ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor was followed.Congruent form and incongruent form coexists, so there must be inner relationship between them and a cognitive mechanism which motivates the transference from congruent form to incongruent form. The author holds a view that congruent form acts as the cognitive reference point of incongruent form---that is prototype. Although they convey the same meaning with different forms, the former is a closer reflection of the reality of the world which is familiar to the listener or speaker, whereas the latter is a little abstract expression compared with congruent form, by means of category extension. Therefore, their relationship is a kind of category extension from prototype to periphery.The author also maintains that the space of GM is elastic but not fixed. It is not reasonable to say that there are two simple alternatives, one is congruent form, the other is incongruent form, but the degree of GM ranges based on the prototype or the cognitive reference point. The prototype extends to peripheral or even continues to its marginal. The farther it is from prototype, the more intense the metaphorical effect is.The ideology people have about the imagery or attributes of physical world comes from their experience .This assumption provides a cognitive ground for prototype theory .With the development of human being's cognition, the structure and symbolization of conceptual content diversified accordingly because of the great influence of prominent view and attentional view. The variations at the lexicalgrammatical level are GM.In this thesis, the author combines the two methods: quantitative and qualitative. Based on large quantity of data and deep analysis, an innovative theoretical framework is created. And then two hypotheses are proposed and are further proved positively by means of introspective, deductive and questionnaire.All in all, based on the analysis and introspection of the past metaphorical study, a complete new attempt is made to explore GM from cognitive perspective which can be of great significance to English teaching.