The Comparison Between Lexical Metaphor And Grammatical Metaphor Of English Language

This dissertation aims to analyze the similarities and differences between lexicalmetaphor and grammatical metaphor of English language, which contributes to the researchon the two kinds of metaphor. Metaphor has been studied from different approaches, such as: Aristotelian approach, theinteractionist approach, the cognitive approach and grammatical approach. The first threeapproaches focus on lexical metaphor, concerning with the variation in the use of words. Butgrammatical metaphor is the variation essentially in the grammatical form. As for the relationbetween the lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor, whether the two kinds of metaphorare same or not is the research topic of the paper. The paper consists of six parts. Chapter one is the introduction part. Chapter two dealswith the theoretical background of lexical metaphor. The third part is the theories ofgrammatical metaphor. The similarities of the two kinds of metaphor are discussed in chapterfour. The first is that the two kinds of metaphor are ubiquitous phenomenon in the language.The second is that the signifiers and signifies of the lexical metaphors and grammaticalmetaphors are not arbitrary. And the last one is that metaphor is helpful for understanding theabstract and complicated ideas in the world. And chapter five mainly focuses on the differences from four perspectives: namelysyntactic perspective, semantic perspective, pragmatic perspective and cognitive perspective.From syntactic perspective, in grammatical metaphor, there is grammatical shift inmetaphorical form compared with congruent form but no such change in lexical metaphor.From semantic perspective, lexical metaphor sees the meaning of source domain beingtransferred into target domain while in grammatical metaphor semantic categories arejunctional in metaphorical elements. From pragmatic perspective, the different roles contextplays in lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor are discussed. From cognitiveperspective, lexical metaphor reflects the cognitive need to create new meaning with thesimilar form while grammatical metaphor is the result of people's need to express the similarmeaning from different forms.