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Transitivity Metaphorization And Its Stylistic Effect

Posted on:2003-07-02Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:W J HaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360062490103Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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The research in linguistics follows the same trend as that of philosophy with the upsurging of postmodernism contemporarily. The concrete representation is the shift of the principal area of linguistic study. The present study has been shifted from lexicon and sentence to text, from syntax to semantics, and from the static study of the isolated interior elements in language to the dynamic study of the interactive relationship between language and the exterior elements surrounding it. Against such a background, systemic-functional grammar has been accepted by more and more linguists because of its unique perspective of functionism and sociosemiotics. Meanwhile, the western circle of linguists launched the heated discussion and intensive investigation of metaphor. Even from the sixties of the 20 century, significant linguists belonging to different schools had paid special attention to metaphorical problems. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson put forward the theory of cognitive metaphor. From then on, metaphor has become the hot cake in linguistic studies. M.A.K. Halliday came up with his theory of grammatical metaphor (later the shortened form GM for convenience) in such academic atmosphere.Rather than follow the beaten road of classical rhetoric, or tread on the heels of the vanguard of cognitive psychology, Halliday hewed his own path and found new interpretation of metaphor in functional grammar. He thinks that ideational function and interpersonal function, which pertain to the three metafunctions, have their respective ideational GM and interpersonal GM, but he is conservative about textual GM. Martin holds that textual function also has its corresponding textual GM and it can be testified by the metaphorization of Theme and Rheme. Martin's theory of textual GM has complemented and broadened GM theory. Halliday mainly studied the ideational GM and took10nominalization as the focus of study. In fact, ideational GM can be subdivided into experiential GM and logical GM. Nominalization is only one part of experiential GM. Experiential GM in nature is transitivity metaphor, because transitivity can better represent the nuclear function of Process in the system of transitivity. The participant, circumstantial elements such as time, space and manner are only the factors surrounding Process. From the above argument, we can see that Zhang Delu's adoption of such term as transitivity metaphorization is reasonable (1998). The thesis in question concentrates on transitivity metaphorization and combines it with the analysis of its stylistic effects in certain context and situation.Since Halliday put forward the theory of grammatical metaphor, scholars in China have begun to introduce it (Zhu Yongsheng, 1994; Hu Zhuanglin, 1996; Shen Dan, 1998; Zhang Delu, 1998), but such theory has not been widely applied in stylistics. Western linguists have made use of syntactic metaphor, paraphrase and other terms like these to analyze novels of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, etc. (Ostrowski, 1993), but the framework of analysis is quite different from that of functional grammar. At present, few scholars have taken grammatical metaphor or certain subbranch of it under thorough and comprehensive investigation and even few have studied the relevant stylistic effect resulting from it. Although the functional linguists with Halliday as their pioneer have gained fruitful results in the field of stylistic study, their analysis mainly circled around the three metafunctions, with ideational function as the most important section. Halliday has attached great importance to the intersectional study of the three metafunctions; such study must be based on the thorough investigation of respective function's analysis. The status quo is that the analysis of ideational function is confined to relative frequency and motivated foregrounding of certain texts, but the grammatical metaphor of these functions is scarcely investigated. If any, it is only limited to nominalization in transitivity metaphor.11According to Halliday, nominalization...
Keywords/Search Tags:Metaphorization
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