A Functional-cognitive Stylistic Approach To Grammatical Metaphor

This dissertation purports to illuminate the stylistic value of grammatical metaphor from an integrated perspective of functional stylistics and cognitive stylistics with a corpus-based analysis of English metalinguistic texts (EMTs). The notion of grammatical metaphor has long been a hot issue since it is first proposed by Halliday (1985a) as one of the core concepts of systemic-functional grammar and in turn of functional stylistics. Recent years have witnessed some tentative efforts to investigate the stylistic value of grammatical metaphor. Meanwhile, with the rapid development of cognitive linguistics and cognitive pragmatics, cognitive stylistics arises as a new interdisciplinary perspective on the style of the text. Likewise, systemic functional linguistics has undergone a cognitive turn in recent years.So far, controversy still exists over the demarcation between congruent and metaphorical variants as well as the scope of grammatical metaphor. The sporadic literature on the stylistic value of grammatical metaphor is generally confined to literary texts and a narrow scope of specialized genres, such as advertising, journalistic, forensic, scientific and technical discourses. Little systematic empirical study has ever been conducted to investigate the distribution of grammatical metaphor in EMTs and its stylistic value. The opposite rank-shifts in ideational and interpersonal metaphors and the underlying tension between the ideational and interpersonal metafucntions of language have not received due attention so as to reveal its semogenic and stylistic implications. This is where the focus of this project resides.This dissertation seeks to apply an integrated functional-cognitive stylistic approach to investigating the distribution of various grammatical metaphors in EMTs and their stylistic value, with an aim to address the following issues: (a) How can the systemic notion of grammatical metaphor and its stylistic value be expounded from an integrated perspective of functional stylistics and cognitive stylistics? (b) In what patterns are various types of grammatical metaphor distributed in EMTs and what stylistic value does it embody? (c) How can the opposite rank-shifts in ideational and interpersonal metaphors be interpreted in relation to the inherent tension between the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of language? And what implications does this tension have on semogenesis and stylistic variation? The major findings of this dissertation include:(i) The systemic notion of grammatical metaphor is derived from the"natural"relationship between lexicogrammar and semantics. This"naturalness"reflects the iconicity inherent in the language system and human conceptualization. The controversial notion of congruence can be revisited in light of the prototype theory(ii) The incongruent and/or deflected distribution of grammatical metaphor in the discourse generally functions as motivated prominence. This renders grammatical metaphor to serve as style markers to engender the contextual effect of foregrounding.(iii) Human language is characterized with reflectivity and hierarchical stratification. The general agnation of natural language and metalanguage attributes EMTs with some distinctive features from other academic texts, particularly in the use of grammatical metaphor, thus constituting a significant aspect of the stylistic characteristics of the text.(iv) The empirical study of the use of grammatical metaphor in the EMT corpus indicates that nominalization, passivization and impersonal subjects are densely distributed in EMTs, whereas transitivity metaphors, mood metaphors, modality metaphors, personal subjects, metaphorical thematic structures and metaphorical information structures are more or less sparsely distributed in them. This suggests that as a sub-genre of academic discourse, EMTs are stylistically characterized with lexical density, impartiality and objectivity, plain language and syntactic simplicity.(v) The empirical study also reveals significant differences in the distribution of grammatical metaphor in introductory EMTs and academic EMTs. Generally speaking, nominalization, passivization and interpersonal subjects are less frequently used in introductory EMTs than in academic EMTs, whereas transitivity metaphors, mood metaphors, modality metaphors, personal subjects, metaphorical thematic structures and metaphorical information structures are more frequently distributed in introductory EMTs than in academic EMTs. This reflects the accessibility of the discourse and primarily results from the author's accommodation towards the cognitive environment of the intended readership.(iv) The inherent ideational-interpersonal tension is instantiated lexicogrammatically as the opposite rank-shifts in ideational and interpersonal metaphors. It permeates the three time frames of semogenesis and has great impact on the development of grammatical metaphor and stylistic variation. The significance of this dissertation are three-fold: (a) The systemic notion of grammatical metaphor and its stylistic value is justified from an integrated perspective of functional stylistics and cognitive stylistics, thus bridging the gap between the constructivist and non-constructivist approaches to metaphor; (b) The distribution pattern of various types of grammatical metaphor in the EMT corpus is empirically investigated so that their stylistic value is revealed; (c) By analyzing the opposite rank-shifts in ideational and interpersonal metaphors, this dissertation illuminates the ideational-interpersonal tension as well as its implications on semogenesis and stylistic variation.