The Comparison Between The Original Version And The Simplified Version Of Oliver Twist From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

The study of metaphor was initially discussed by Aristotelians and Platonists in ancientGreek and a new upsurge was pushed forward by western scholars in1960s. In contemporarytheories of metaphor, there are mainly two schools, namely non-constructivism andconstructivism (see Ortony1979). However, all the studies above on metaphor are limited onlexical level. The theoretical concept of grammatical metaphor is first put forward by M.A.K.Halliday, the founder of systemic-functional grammar. He proposes that we should look atvariations in the expression of meanings not only on lexical level but also on lexicogramaticallevel. Grammatical metaphor includes the lexical metaphor. He also classifies grammaticalmetaphor into two kinds: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor.This thesis will be based on Halliday’s theory of grammatical metaphor to make acomparative analysis of the original version and simplified version of Oliver Twist from theperspective of ideational and interpersonal metaphor. Though there are differences between theoriginal version and the simplified version of a literary work, the simplified version shouldalways be ‘faithful’ to the original one in terms of the basic meaning of the literary work.Therefore, a comparison of the two versions can surely reveal us different variations of therepresentational meaning: One is grammatical metaphor and the other is the correspondingcongruent form. The author of the thesis aims to dig out the reasons why grammatical metaphorsare frequently employed in the language of the original version and why congruent forms aremore often used in the simplified version and elaborate different functions of the two forms indifferent versions and the enlightment in English study.