Phenomena Of Grammatical Metaphors In Linguistic Research Abstracts

The study of metaphor was originated from Aristotle, who has given metaphor a primitive definition in "Poetics". Later on, this area aroused a great attention of many scholars and was applied to various stylistic analyses, which not only perfected the metaphor theory but also brought the metaphor study up to a very high level. Halliday recently puts forward the concept of grammatical metaphor in his systemic and functional grammar, paying a special attention to grammatical metaphor.There already exist many cases of text analysis on grammatical metaphor. All the studies show that the theory of grammatical metaphor can be successfully applied to text deconstruction and this thesis aims to apply the grammatical metaphor theory to research abstracts. As an exact and concise summary of the source article, abstract continues to grow in importance. In the past years, many manuals have been published to instruct the standardized writing of abstracts. Meanwhile, descriptive studies on the structural and linguistic features of abstracts in special disciplines were carried out from the perspective of genre analysis. Besides, some cross-cultural or cross-linguistic researches have been conducted, and the comparative study of English and Spanish research abstracts in experimental social sciences is a case in point. However, the study of research abstracts from the perspective of grammatical metaphor was rare both in English and Chinese.This research attempts to analyze the research abstracts from the following aspects: find out the distribution of grammatical metaphor in research abstracts (features); probe into the question of whether research abstracts achieve preciseness through grammatical metaphors and what do they contribute to research abstracts (functions); finally provide consultation for abstracts writing from different point of views (significance).This paper chooses forty five abstracts randomly from eight authoritative foreign and Chinese journals to guarantee the objectivity of study. And Halliday's grammatical theory is employed for the analysis of English research abstracts. It first carries on the qualitative method and explains the ambiguous questions during the analysis process. And then it presents the distribution of grammatical metaphor based on the statistical study. Finally, this paper discusses the motivations and functions underlying the phenomenon and provides some pedagogical implications for abstracts writing.The result of my study shows that there are a large number of grammar metaphors in research abstracts, but its distribution is uneven and ideational metaphor accounts for a larger proportion. Within grammatical metaphors, nominalization occupies a prominent position, which is explained from different perspectives. The proportion that interpersonal metaphor takes up in research abstracts is relatively small, among which metaphor of mood hardly occurs. This, on the one hand, may attribute to the particular genre of research abstracts. On the other hand, it may result from the limited data I collected, therefore needs further investigation.On the basis of my study, there arise some pedagogical implications. Firstly, the teachers can analyze a large number of typical examples for the students to master the linguistic features of research abstract. And then from the imitation of those examples, the students can improve their ability to write research abstract. Meanwhile, in second language teaching, the teachers can analyze other genres by using this method in order to guide the study of the students.