Strategies Of Interpreting Grammatical Metaphor In English Reading Comprehension

Reading is one of the important skills to cultivate students’comprehensive language ability. Therefore, reading teaching has always been one of the key and difficult points of college English teaching. After the research have been done on analyzing key factors which determine the difficulty of a discourse, Fan Wenfang (1996) etc. found that grammatical metaphor is one of indispensable factors. However, the previous research is restrained to the analysis of scientific discourse and ignore the fact that metaphorical realizations have become an indispensable and common phenomenon in daily written discourse rather than simply in scientific discourse. Therefore, on the basis of referring to the authoritative works and discourse of grammatical metaphor with the help of theoretical deduction and example analysis, the major findings of the study as follows:Firstly, this thesis analyzes the factors why grammatical metaphors increase the difficulties of discourse understanding. The complexity of grammatical metaphor is attributed to the dual semantic feature, lexical density and cognitive effort contained in grammatical metaphor.Then the interpreting strategies of grammatical metaphor are proposed based on the complexity of grammatical metaphor. It includes five sub-strategies: recognizing strategies of grammatical metaphor at lexicogrammatical level and semantic level respectively, the strategy combined the two above and analyzing strategies of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor respectively in reading texts.Finally, some implications of grammatical metaphor in the teaching of English reading are proposed.This study is of great significance both in theory and practice.Theoretically, the study broadens the research scope of grammatical metaphor, and offers a deep understanding about the characteristics and nature of grammatical metaphor. Practically, it throws light upon English reading comprehension, which helps students to improve their ability of analyzing reading texts and provides a new guiding principle for teachers to give instructions in teaching English reading.