A Contrastive Study Between Original Version Of A Christmas Carol And Its Simplified Versions From The Approach Of Grammatical Metaphor

The research work in this thesis is focused upon a contrastive study between the originalversion of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and its three simplified versions within thetheoretical framework of Halliday’s Grammatical Metaphor.Metaphor has been an important field which has been studied under the different linguisticapproaches for a long time, and the study of it flourished in the20th century. However, fromancient times to modern times, the research of metaphor has always been limited to the lexicallevel. Different from the study in the past, the Grammatical Metaphor proposed by Hallidaygives a brand-new illustration from the perspective of grammatical approach. Ever since itsappearance, Grammatical Metaphor has aroused the attention from more and more linguists, andhas been constantly applied to the practical analysis of many different kinds of materials, such aslegislative documents, commercial contracts, inaugural addresses, etc.In this thesis, the author will conduct a contrastive study and analysis within the theoreticalframework of Grammatical Metaphor by choosing some examples from the original version ofCharles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the corresponding examples from its three simplifiedversions as the data. Through the analysis, it can be found that in the original version of the novelplenty of Ideational Metaphors and Interpersonal Metaphors have been used, making thedescription more vivid and coherent and helping realize the writing purpose of the author.However, in the simplified versions these metaphorical expressions are often transferred andunpacked into those of the congruent forms. The current research attempts to find out the reasonsto this phenomenon. At the same time, the author of the thesis tries to examine how theexpressions of the Grammatical Metaphor in the original novel are transferred and unpacked intothose of the congruent form in the simplified versions.The tentative findings of the research are that different social purposes of the contextdetermine different choices of language expression; on the other hand, different choices oflanguage expression can be employed to achieve different social purposes of the context. It issincerely hoped that the findings of this research will provide some useful suggestions to theEnglish teaching, especially to the teaching of English reading in middle school or primaryschool.