A Functional And Cognitive Approach To Grammatical Metaphor In Scientific English Discourse

The study of metaphor can be traced back to the Ancient Greek PhilosopherAristotle in western tradition. He and his followers thought that metaphor is a figure ofspeech used for decoration and ornamentation, particularly in literary area, andmetaphor is considered a linguistic phenomenon. This tradition had lasted for a verylong time until cognitive linguists represented by Lakoff and Johnson discovered theuniversality of metaphorical nature of language and human thought. Their study ofmetaphor can be regarded as a milestone in the development of metaphor theory.However, Lakoff and Johnson's study about metaphor or conceptual metaphor theoryis restricted to the level of lexicon. What's more, their research emphasis is put onconventional metaphor which plays an important role in human reasoning. Since themetaphoricity of language is ubiquitous and pervasive, metaphor must occur at thelevel of grammar. It was Halliday who first put forward the concept of"grammaticalmetaphor"in 1985. But the awareness of metaphor in grammar was not originated byHalliday. This awareness can be dated back to the Middle Ages. After more than tenyears'development and improvement, Halliday broke the tri-classification ofgrammatical metaphor and redefined and reclassified grammatical metaphor in 1996.He argued that grammatical metaphor includes all rank-shift and class-shiftphenomena. He changed his classification criterion. Based on the extent of floatinginto the thinginess, he divided grammatical metaphor into 13 types. His new definitionand classification of grammatical metaphor provide a powerful instrument and aunique method for scientific discourse analysis.With the discovery of metaphorical nature of language and human thought,people began to break the recognizing and studying limitation by logical empiricismwhich holds the view that scientific language is dry and objective. Many people start tostudy the metaphorical nature of scientific discourse. In this thesis, based onHalliday's new definition and classification of grammatical metaphor, the authorexplores the grammatical metaphor in scientific discourse with the emphasis onnominalization, from a functional and cognitive perspective. According to the dataanalysis in ten scientific discourses randomly collected from authoritative books andarticles, the author found that nominalization is the most frequent type of grammatical metaphor in scientific discourse. Consequently, the author investigated the function ofnominalization in constructing scientific discourse. Finally the author found that themain function of nominalization in scientific discourse is increasing technicality andrationality.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one reviewed the development history of metaphor from ancient GreekPhilosopher Aristotle to modern cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson, andfunctional linguists like Halliday. And it further pointed out the connection betweengrammatical metaphor and traditional metaphor and conceptual metaphor, and theunique feature of grammatical metaphor. In addition, grammatical metaphor is acritical and prominent feature of scientific discourse.Chapter two first briefly reviewed Halliday's new definition and classification ofgrammatical metaphor. Meanwhile, it explored the relationship between Halliday'sgrammar and language view and his grammatical metaphor. Further more, the authorattempts to dig out the cognitive rationale of grammatical metaphor: class-shift.Chapter three is the core of this thesis. First it pointed out the importance ofstudying scientific discourse and the necessity of exploring grammatical metaphor inscientific discourse. Then the author raised the research questions in this thesis andused a statistical method to investigate the frequency of each type of grammaticalmetaphor in ten scientific discourses and found that nominalization is the mostfrequent type of grammatical metaphor in scientific discourse. Finally, the authorbriefly discussed the function of nominalization in constructing scientific discourse.Chapter four is the further development of chapter three and it discussed therelationship between grammatical metaphor and scientific discourse from a functionaland cognitive perspective.Chapter five is the whole conclusion of this thesis. This chapter pointed out hisresearch limitation and the bright future of grammatical metaphor research.