The Study Of Textual Metaphor From The Perspective Of Transitivity

From the diachronic perspective of linguistics, the study of metaphor originates from Plato's heliotrope, but it is modern metaphor theory that leads the metaphor study from the lexical level to the textual level. And textual metaphor is the main body of the study to metaphorical texts. At the beginning, as the complement to ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, Martin first put forward the term'textual metaphor', and proposed the idea of metaphorical themes and metaphorical news which can be seen as two kinds of textual metaphor. But it seems that Martin mostly focuses on the clause level, but not the textual level. From then on , the study to textual metaphor never stops. But the author of this dissertation found that the study of textual metaphor is always limited in the perspective of themes, information and cohesion, which are reasonable since those are the three aspects of Halliday's textual function. But is it possible to study textual metaphor from other perspectives which are not in the textual function put forward by Halliday? After studying the corpus, the author of this dissertation believes that it is possible, therefore, this dissertatoion tries to go further in the field and proposes my own ideas.The dissertation starts with the possibility to study textual metaphor from the perspective of transitivity. Then it tries to prove the possibility with Halliday's Rankshifting. By analyzing the corpus, the author of the dissertation finds that it concords with Halliday's Rankshifting, and it is the textual metaphor. In order to state easily, the dissertation names it'transitivitical textual metaphor'to differ from Halliday's ideational metaphor, which can be studied from transitivity perspective. During the process of analyzing the corpus, the author finds out that transitivitical textual metaphor can function quite differently from traditional perspectives, especially on the aspect of subjectivity and bisementic, which gives a strong proof to the significance of studying textual metaphor from the perspective of transitivity.This research may offer a new perspective to the study of textual metaphor, and the author also hopes that other researchers may go further in this field.