A Study On Correlations Between Grammatical Metaphor And Quality Of College Students' English Writing

It has a very long history of metaphor study and the earliest explanation of metaphor can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. The theory of Grammatical Metaphor is firstly put forward by M. A. K. Halliday in his book "An Introduction to Functional Grammar" in 1985, which marked the beginning of the theoretical study on GM. Much work has been done on GM since the theory raised by Halliday and it includes the types, characteristics as well as functions of GM.As one of four important language skills, English writing is considered as the most difficult and weakest one. Though English writing capability of college students is constantly being improved, there exist some problems. Therefore the way to improve EFL students'writing ability is turned into the spotlight and the elements concerning with the quality of English writings become the key points of present study. As a trend follower this study aims to study on the correlations between textual functions of GM and the quality of English writings.This study is qualitative in nature. Both document analysis and data-based study are used to explore textual functions of GM and the correlations between GM and the quality of English writings. Document analysis is a theoretical way to dig out textual functions of GM in written language and relevant hypothesis is raised according the results of document study. And the hypothesis is that there exists close relations between GM and the quality of English writings. Afterwards data-based analysis is used to check on the hypothesis in technical way and this part will show the distributing rules of GM in different level of writings, and the degree of influence that different types of GM impact on the quality of English writings is clear. The findings of this study will be presented on the basis of document analysis and data-based study.The results of this study shows that GM has many textual functions, which can add conciseness, coherence, objectivity, precision and vividness to English discourses. Data-based analysis proves that there is close relations between GM and the quality of English writings, and the displacement of different types of GM is not the same in different levels of writings. There are more ideational metaphors and textual metaphors in high quality's discourses while interpersonal metaphors are widespread in writings with lower scores. GM especially ideational metaphors possess major contribution to improve the quality of EFL English writings, while interpersonal metaphor is just the opposite for it makes the discourse colloquial.