A Contrastive Analysis Of Great Expectations And Its Simplified Version From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

The phenomenon of metaphors is pervasive; it happens not only on the lexical level butalso on the grammatical level. M.A.K Halliday first proposed the theory of grammaticalmetaphors in his publication of An Introduction to Functional Grammar in1985. WithinHalliday’s theoretical framework of grammatical metaphor, he proposed two types of GM,ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor, respectively basedon the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. According to Halliday, the device ofnominalizing is the most powerful source of creating ideational grammatical metaphors, whilehe further divided the interpersonal grammatical metaphors into metaphors of mood andmetaphors of modality. In the lights of Halliday, metaphorical modes of expression arecharacteristics of all adult discourse and the only examples of discourse without are in youngchildren’s speech. Recently, the theory of grammatical metaphors has gained increasingattention and popularity among the scholars studying in the field of Systemic-FunctionGrammar both at home and abroad. Many scholars have put the theory into the research ofvarious discourses and made great contribution to the development of grammatical metaphors.Similarly, quite a lot of scholars and researchers at home and abroad have carried out thestudies on the great novel Great Expectations, one of Charles Dickens’ most influential works,from many aspects, such as the translation of this novel, its language style, etc. However, acontrastive analysis within Halliday’s theoretical framework of grammatical metaphors betweenthe original version of Great Expectations and its simplified version is seldom being researchedand relatively insufficient. Therefore, the theory of grammatical metaphors within Halliday’sfunctional grammar is adopted by the author as the theoretical framework of the present studyfor the contrastive analysis of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and its simplified version,in order to find out the differences between the two versions.