An Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In Pride And Prejudice Based On Three Metafunctions

As the masterpiece of Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice is widely recognized as one of the most popular novels throughout the world. The novel is world-renowned for distinctive language style and vivid depictions of characters. There are numerous grammatical metaphors in the novel, which contribute to the pictorial descriptions of the personalities and feeling of characters.Grammatical metaphor is first proposed in 1985 by Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics. Different from traditional metaphor, grammatical metaphor exists on the lexical level as well as the grammatical level. The same meaning can be realized by more than one lexico-grammatical form, either congruently or incongruently, and grammatical metaphor refers to the incongruent expression of meaning, and it consists of ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor. This thesis carries out an analysis of grammatical metaphors selected from Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of three metafunctions.The concept of metafunction, as the theoretical basis of systemic functional linguistics, is put forward by Halliday. Metafunction includes three sub-categories: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Ideational function refers to the function of language used to describe both the physical world and the mental world, and it gets achieved within the transitivity system. Interpersonal function refers to the function of language used to interact, establish and maintain social links with others, and it gets achieved within the systems of mood and modality. Textual function refers to the function of language used to organize the message and to achieve the ideational and interpersonal functions, getting achieved mainly by the thematic structure and information structure.Since its publication in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has been systematically analyzed from several different aspects, both within the literary field and in the linguistic field. In this thesis, grammatical metaphors selected from Pride and Prejudice, namely, ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor, are analyzed respectively within the transitivity system, the mood and modality systems, and the thematic and information structures. It aims to work out how, in comparison with the congruent expressions, grammatical metaphors get realized as well as better contribute to the pictorial depictions of personalities and feeling of characters.