Research Into The Cognitive Function Of Grammatical Metaphor-in Perspective Of Tense And Aspect

This thesis tries to analyze and explore grammatical metaphor form the angle of cognitive linguistics, based on the research of former scholars', combining with systematic functional grammar, general linguistics, modern metaphor theories, pargamtics, and languistic philosophy etc. It aims at analysing the embodiment of gammatical metaphor in the language structure level, particularly from the perspective of tense and aspect in English, to analyze the language structure composition, to re-examine and describe this kind of language phenomenon, providing certain cognitive explanation to this language phenomenon and language development, and reflect its importance and cognitive function in language study and application in order to promote people's understanding to the objective world and to help people with their language study, comprehension and usage.There are totally five chapters in this thesis:Chapter one gives a brief review of grammatical metaphor study. Here, metaphor studied abroad is introduced in comparison with its study at home. This chapter gives a diachronic introduction of metaphor's development history and important findings of grammatical metaphor study. It also involves the significance, feasibility and necessity of grammatical metaphor study. Obviously, the first chapter tries to lay a theoretical foundation for the further discussion.Chapter two mainly introduces Halliday's basic view of grammatical metaphor theories in his systematic functional grammar and other scholars' contribution to this theory and then especially discusses the grounding of grammatical metaphor and metaphor's cognitive basis etc. It gives a cognitive definition and classification of grammatical metaphor. Great attention is paid to congruent and incongruent grammatical metaphor, because this will be used to analyze the tense and aspect in the following chapter. It can be treated as the continuing theoretical foundation for the further discussion in cognitive linguistics.Chapter three is the most important part in the whole thesis. Based on the former introduction, it goes on to deal with tense and aspect grammatical category and to analyze language structure composition, to re-examine and describe this kind of language phenomenon; meanwhile, to provide a cognitive explanation to this phenomenon and its development regularity. It gives a detailed analysis on the definition, types and classification of tense and aspect, illustrating the usage of them with examples. Some special usages of them are also stated here.Chapter four mainly discusses the cognitive function of grammatical metaphor, the analysis of its application in language learning. Studies on the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system have shown that the meaning and forms of English tense and aspect are complex and difficult for language learning.Chapter five is the conclusion. It provides a summary and comments on the research methods and contents. It involves the promising of the future research, and reveals the existing problems in this thesis.