An Interpretation Of Halliday's Grammatical Metaphor From The Cognitive Perspective

On the basis of the three metafunctions of his functional linguistics, Halliday develops the grammatical metaphor theory which is an important part of his functional grammar. Its construction is for the purpose of discourse analysis, which is the sole aim of functional grammar. This theory has enriched Halliday's functional grammar and broadened the scope of metaphor study, and as a result, deepens the language users'understanding of metaphor. On the other hand, Halliday is restricted in language study and its function from the social perspective, which leads to grammatical metaphor theory beyond being perfect and gains little acceptance from researchers out of functional linguistics. To have a full understanding of it, this dissertation attempts to interpret grammatical metaphor from the cognitive perspective. Specifically, it explores the generative motivation and mechanism of interpretation on the basis of cognitive linguistics.Connecting the classical works on grammatical metaphor with the new development of cognitive linguistics and the latest achievements, this dissertation expounds the plausibility and operation of interpreting grammatical metaphor from the cognitive view, with the help of theoretical deduction and example analysis. In the process of discussion, this dissertation for the sake of keeping Halliday's 13 new types of grammatical metaphor in accordance with his theory of the three metafunctions reclassifies his new types of grammatical metaphor subordinate to his original mode, i.e. ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor, and textual metaphor. First of all, this paper investigates the measurement to distinguish congruent expression from metaphorical one on the basis of Taylor's and Lakoff's linguistic category theory. Then, it puts the focus on interpreting Halliday's classification of grammatical metaphor from the viewpoint of image theory, which is the foundation of Langacker's cognitive grammar. The study illustrates that interpreting grammatical metaphor from the cognitive perspective can make up for the inadequacies of grammatical metaphor, so that the researchers can have a better understanding of it. Moreover, the study also finds that interpreting the function of grammatical metaphor in the discourse from the cognitive view and distinguishing the differences and similarities between grammatical metaphor and grammaticalization need more work of the researchers.Qian Guanlian(1996:74) says:"any one of theoretical systems that explores the functions of language, no matter how complete and perfect it seems, actually, is far from perfect. So it needs to be made up by another different system."This dissertation is just an attempt to study...