A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese Common Scientific Discourse

The metaphor study can be traced back to the Aristotle time in ancient Greece over two thousands years ago. From then on, scholars from various fields have made many studies on metaphor from different perspectives and have achieved great successes. Grammatical metaphor was first proposed by Halliday and acts as an important part of his functional grammar. With further development, the grammatical metaphor has already become the most powerful tool to elaborate the nature of metaphor and made great contributions to the modern metaphor studies. Within the theoretical framework of grammatical metaphor, the thesis makes a statistic analysis to testify the universality of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese scientific discourse which is proposed by Halliday. Based on 13 kinds of Halliday's newly-classified types of grammatical metaphor, the contrastive study explores the similarities and differences, and further discusses the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor from the aspect of functional use of language.Chapter one firstly gives a brief introduction to the metaphor development and the previous studies on grammatical metaphor, then reviews the researches on scientific discourse and summarizes the general features and lastly indicates the relationship between grammatical metaphor and scientific discourse. Chapter two is devoted to the discussion of a systematic-functional approach to grammatical metaphor. The author first traces and discusses the different ideas proposed by some important researchers from systematic-functional perspective. Halliday's theoretical framework of grammatical metaphor is particularly stressed and explained in details. Meanwhile, the author introduces the development and perfection of grammatical metaphor under the systematic-functional framework. At last, the reclassification of grammatical metaphor is listed and discussed in details. All of these works build the theoretical foundation for contrastive analyses of English and Chinese common scientific discourse in the following chapters. Chapter three first raises the research questions, and then gives a brief introduction to the data resources and research method and makes data statistics of the collected data at last. Chapter four first makes a surface analysis of the similarities and differences in both English and Chinese common scientific discourse. The research shows that a lot of grammatical metaphors exist in both English and Chinese common scientific discourse. The nominalization and adjectivization in high frequency are the common features. The major differences lie in that: the English grammatical metaphors have the rich inflections while the Chinese lacks the morphological inflections; passive voice is frequently used in English while it is seldom used in Chinese; the grammatical metaphors in Chinese are more frequently used as modifiers, while they are more likely to be employed as things in English. This chapter also analyzes the main reasons causing the similarities and differences. Moreover,this chapter points out that the deep reason why the grammatical metaphors are used widely in both English and Chinese scientific discourse lies in the functions of grammatical metaphors. During the process of data analyses, it is found that the functions of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese have a surprising resemblance. There are three main functions in discourse construction: the referring function, expanding function and condensing function. In addition, two other important functions are also discussed: the experimental-reconstructing function and the functions of keeping objectivity. The last chapter discusses some implications of our metaphor study, which is of great significance to the translation and teaching of English scientific discourse.The proposal of grammatical metaphor theory serves as a great milestone in the history of metaphor study. This study is of great value and importance for us to have a better command of the features of common scientific discourse, and further have a better understanding of the nature of scientific language,as well as human language at large.