A Study On GM And Its Functions In ESD

Metaphor is by no means a new theory founded by modern people. Its researches can be traced back to the period of Aristotle and Plato. Many scholars have followed Plato, viewing metaphor as a kind of word game, one kind of rhetoric. Their studies are limited to lexical level. What they made research on is called lexical metaphor. Some scholars do have noticed the grammatical metaphor(GM). With the publishing of An Introduction to Functional Grammar, systemic study on GM was founded. Many researchers, such as Hu Zhuanglin, Thompson, Halliday and Dong Hongle have made a large number of studies on GM. This thesis also chooses GM as its research field.Because of the previous studies of Plato, many scholars afterwards view metaphor as word game. Therefore, they believe that this kind of language phenomenon can not be found in scientific text. Scientific text is a text of"doing science". It should be full of truths without much rhetoric. With the development of linguistics and the founding of systemic-functional grammar, this viewpoint becomes controversial. Lakoff and Johnson prove that even our concepts are metaphorical. Many scholars have found that metaphor can appear in scientific text. Halliday has written many papers to prove that metaphor is everywhere in scientific text.This thesis will give a brief introduction of the history of metaphor study. Then it will focus on grammatical metaphor. The thesis sets systemic-functional grammar to be its theoretical foundation. Halliday's GM theory is one of the important theories of this school. He classified GM into 13 types. The thesis will follow this classification and will analyze the reasons of this classification. It also uses Halliday's GM theory to analyze the real English scientific texts, which are extracted from science writings. First, the writer finds out all the GMs in the text based on Halliday's classification, and analyze the data to find the most popular ones. The aim of doing this is to make a study on the functions of GM using in English scientific discourse (ESD). In order to make a better analysis, the thesis analyzes the definition and writing features of ESD before studying GMs in the ESD.Through the studying and analyzing of GMs in ESD, the writer hopes to prove the existence and the function of GM so as to help readers to make better understanding of ESD.