The Interpretation Of Grammatical Metaphor: A Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor study has a long history and the earliest one can be dated back to the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece. Since then, a number of interpretations of metaphor have been presented by scholars from different fields, such as Aristotle's Comparison Theory, Richards and Black's Interaction Theory, and Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory. However, the majority of metaphor researches are confined to lexical level and the metaphorical expressions on the grammatical level has scarcely been investigated.Halliday's discussion of grammatical metaphor marks a genuine beginning of the study of metaphor at grammatical level, though American scholars such as Givon, Heine and Hopper studied this phenomenon under the title of iconicity and grammaticalization. Halliday brings forward and develops his Grammatical Metaphor Theory. His theory enriches metaphorical studies and provides us with a completely new realm of metaphor study, in particular with respect to the discourse analysis of scientific discourse. However, his theory contains some insufficiencies particularly in terms of the concept"congruent", which is of fundamental importance to the understanding of grammatical metaphor. A number of linguists from Functional Linguistics put forward their interpretations, which are in essence similar to Halliday's interpretation.In order to have a better understanding about the nature of"congruent"and grammatical metaphor, this thesis intends to apply some views from Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics holds that language is metaphorical in nature, grammar is imagic in nature, and language structure is imagic in nature. Different grammatical expressions can construe the same phenomenon based on these different imageries.Prototype Theory in Cognitive Linguistics holds that categories of the physical world are formed around the prototypes in the process of categorization. The categorization of language itself is also developed by prototypes, and grammatical classes are no exception. Halliday's ideational metaphor and his reclassification of grammatical metaphor are in essence about the transformations of grammatical classes.The imagery nature of grammar provides a theoretical ground for the transformations of grammatical classes, namely, nominalization, verbalization, and adjectivization, which form the typical types of grammatical metaphor.Furthermore, the thesis attempts to analyze the cognitive processes involved in the process of N-V shift, or verbalization through the application of Blending Theory. It is concluded that nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization respectively involve at least two cognitive processes.Combined with our observation of Halliday's reclassification of types of grammatical metaphor, the thesis reaches the conclusion that"congruent"refers to the prototype or prototypical usage of grammatical classes and that grammatical metaphor in nature is the marked morphological and syntactic variation, and the construction and creation of a grammatical metaphor involves at least two cognitive processes: the first is the mapping within the same semantic domain but the transformation of grammatical classes occur; the second is the mapping between different semantic domains while the original meaning is replaced by the metaphorical one.