Grammatical Metaphor And Point Of View

As is known, ever since Aristotle people have been interested in and doing a lot of research on metaphor, but most of the studies of metaphor have been mainly concerned with metaphor in its rhetorical sense. Though some linguists realized the metaphorical nature of grammar, research on grammatical metaphor (GM) was rare. It was with the systemic-functionalists that the conscious study of GM started. Yet, studies on GM are far from being enough. It is found that there is certain relationship between GM and point of view. Therefore, the dissertation ventures to make some exploration on the relationship between GM and point of view.Following the introduction, the second chapter presents some systemic-functionalists' different views and treatments of GM. It was Halliday's idea of GM that marked the beginning of the theoretical study on GM. Ever since then, quite a lot of systemic-functionalists, namely, Ravelli, Martin, Mattiessen and Goatly, have taken up the topic and made their contributions to it, which are of great importance to the study of GM. Based on Halliday's treatment of GM as transferred realizations in the lexicogrammar and other researchers'approaches, GM is regarded as an incongruent realization of meanings involving transference of grammatical units from one grammatical domain to another, and it is divided into three kinds: ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor.Then, the dissertation turns to the research of point of view in the third chapter. Point of view is derived from stylistic criticism and defined as "the psychological perspective through which a story is told (Fowler, 1986: 112)". Simpson transferred the concept of point of view to linguistics and identified four important categories: spatial and temporal point of view, ideological point of view and psychologicalpoint of view. This dissertation specifically focuses on the angle and attitude people hold as they encode the world. GM may go into existence when point of view is not in accordance with the usual logical sequence on the grammatical level people have to look at the world. And point of view can determine grammatical variation in a discourse through the employment of metaphorical realization.Since ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor are correlated to point of view closely, the following two chapters will deal with it respectively. By ideational metaphor, especially by nominalization, it is likely to package information, create special texture, achieve discoursal and stylistic effects, and show ideological trends; the employment of the two types of interpersonal metaphor, metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality, results from viewpoints of making semantic prediction, achieving some special effects and reveal subjective or objective trends. So, it can be concluded that the two applications of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor are greatly due to all these patterns of viewpoints, thus proving that point of view can be realized by grammatical metaphor.