Stylistic Construction By Grammatical Metaphor In Beloved

This thesis is about theory and application. Based on the grammatical metaphor (GM) theory within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this thesis tries to probe into the stylistic construction in the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison.Halliday (2000) initially raised the concept of GM which is taken as a variation in the expression of a given meaning; it's a kind of incongruent expression. There are ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor according to Halliday while黄国文(2000),范文芳(2001),刘承宇(2002), Thompson (2000) and Martin (1992/2004) all admit the existence of textual metaphor. Beloved is characterized by its elegant and incongruent expression in language to which many schools of theory can be employed to support (雷格2000: xiii). The author of this thesis analyses Beloved in the ideational, interpersonal and textual metaphor. In addition, through statistic analysis, it is found that the incorrect non-grammatical expressions at least in Beloved construct certain style, and this kind of realization is also a means of grammatical metaphor since the expressions are in the nature incongruent. And a finial conclusion is expected to be made that language of incongruent expressions constructs the stylistic features of the work. In short, this paper aims to raise and debate problematic issues in the study of grammatical metaphors, and to foreground the concrete application study: stylistic construction by GM in Beloved. The stylistic analysis towards novels by employing GM has rarely done by anybody in the world and it is just a tentative attempt to the author.The beginning two chapters make subsequently reviews on the stylistic theories and GM theories by the functionalists. It is a judgment by the author of this thesis that the two, literary stylistics and GM, can be combined and GM can be a profitable tool in analysing Beloved by Toni Morrison.Chapter 3 applies ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor to the analysis of Section 20 of Beloved, which can typically represent the stylistic feature of the whole novel. Chapter 4 is involved in a detailed qualitative analysis of three extracts from an all-round perspective of GM. Still in this chapter, a quantitative statistics is provided to illustrate there exists large amount of non-grammatical expressions in the novel and they are actually grammatical metaphors.In the conclusion, the author has firstly reviewed the study and has pointed out the implications, limitation and prospects for further study in the field of GM theory.