Investigation Of Grammatical Metaphor In Literary Critical Essays And Its Implications

Grammatical metaphor, since it was put forward by Halliday, has been given much attention in linguistic field. At present, there are few articles on literary critical essays based on GM. The author assumes that scientism characterized with GM has also impacted literary critical essays from the perspective of concept, the construct of interpersonal relations and textual formation.The author selected 40 essays with different topics from The Cambridge Companion and analysed the samples by means of quantitative and qualitative study to find out first about the GM distribution pattern in literary critical essays. Supported by the statistics from the corpus, the author of this thesis, by means of comparison and contrast with five other major styles, tries to reveal whether the distribution patterns of ideational and interpersonal GM have the features of incongruity and deflection from other styles and whether the features of GM have stylistic value in LCEs.The study shows that GM is prevalent and a prominent feature in literary critical essays but the distribution of ideational and interpersonal GM is disproportionate. Ideational GM is dominant in the samples and some of them has none of interpersonal GM. In the mechanism of the ideational GM, other experiential processes tend to be transfigured as relational process. Items concerning nominalization have also been discussed to expound its positive and negative effect on LCEs.In interpersonal GM, the composition is characterized with projecting clause and emphatic sentence pattern. Through comparison and contrast, it was concluded that the distribution of GM, either ideational GM or interpersonal GM, is distinct from those of other styles, indicating that LCE is a totally new style and requiring a further study to reveal its stylistic features.On the basis of the study, the author put forward the significance in second language teaching and critical essay composition. Because of limited material that the author can have access to, especially materials from the perspective of diachronic study, it can't concluded whether the GM in literary critical essays, like science discourse, has evolved from a more congruent mode of expression. Besides, GM theory has its limitation in interpreting all the metaphor phenomena in selected material, so it is proposed by the author that the future study can be carried out combined GM theory with the theory of cognitive metaphor.