A Study Of Textual Metaphor In English Poetry From The Perspective Of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar

Metaphor, as C. Lewis argues, is the living principle of poetry and the honor of poets. In terms of traditional rhetoric, metaphor is one of the most frequently adopted rhetoric devices in poetry. While in terms of cognitive linguistics, metaphor has become a major cognitive mode and helped poets express their primal and plain understanding of nature and man himself in concise and condensed language. Therefore, the study of poetry to some extent is to study metaphor.This thesis attempts to explore the never-exhausting resources of pleasure in poetry through a feasible linguistic approach since poetry is in nature a use of language no matter how deviated it looks. So what is important is not the interpretation itself, but the process of exploration by means of investigating into linguistic features which seem to give textual warrant to the interpretation. This thesis is not meant to cover all English poetry, but to choose textual metaphor as a cut-in point to discuss English poetry under the guidance of two clues: metaphor as a linguistic entity and metaphor as a cognitive mechanism.Metaphor in terms of traditional linguistic approach is regarded as a linguistic entity and the basis of metaphor application is the similarity between the tenor and the vehicle. Traditional metaphor study which can be traced back to Aristotle has experienced three phases: the comparison view, the substitution view and the interaction view. Though these three classical views see metaphor as a kind of decorative addition to ordinary plain language, they have shown a shift of focus in metaphor study from language per se to the cognitive nature of metaphor. Metaphor in terms of cognitive linguistics is regarded as a cognitive mechanism. Metaphor in this sense is not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason. The working mechanism of metaphor is to manipulate categories by means of cross-domain mappings.However, metaphor in poetry sometimes takes the form and bears the characteristics of a text. This kind of metaphor is called "textual metaphor" in this thesis and it consists of two categories: extended metaphor and grammatical. Extended metaphor, a term put forward by traditional rhetoric, breaks the one-to-one relationship between tenor and vehicle in metaphor study. While extended metaphor in cognitive linguistics is regarded as an extension of conceptual metaphor. Grammatical metaphor sheds light on the transferences within grammatical domains and to some extent can be interpreted as the lexicogrammatical representation of conceptual metaphor. The discussions of the two types of textual metaphor in chapter 2, though from a macroscopical aspect, help provide ways to identify textual metaphor in English poetry.As a semantic unit with cohesive properties, textual metaphor could be put to a...