A Study Of English And Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice From The Perspective Of Metaphor Of Modality

In the Western world, the study of metaphor can be traced back to the age of Aristotle, over2,000years ago. Since then, researchers from different academic areas have handled metaphor from their own perspectives and proposed a surge of thought-provoking theories. In recent several decades, Metaphor study has become a multi-disciplinary topic. Researchers especially the functionalists and cognitive linguists made fruitful studies. Since the1960s, there has been a great deal of metaphor mania by linguists and philosophers in the international academic field. Grammatical metaphor, a concept initiated by M. A. K. Halliday, is regarded as an indispensable part of systemic-functional grammar, which has made a special contribution to the study of metaphor’s nature and function. The study of grammatical metaphor has probed into a new dimension of metaphor research, and also interpreted grammatical metaphor as a re-construal of human experience. Grammatical metaphor has provided a brand-new perspective for human being to reconstruct world experience.Halliday accounted for this language phenomenon exclusively in his Introduction to Functional Grammar in1985. He referred to two types of grammatical metaphor, the ideational grammatical metaphor and the interpersonal grammatical metaphor. And interpersonal grammatical metaphor includes mood metaphor and modality metaphor, this thesis attempts to adopt Halliday’s theory of metaphor of modality to the study of Chinese language, and then to make a comparison of both languages.Starting from metaphor of modality in Systemic Functional Grammar, the author employs qualitative and quantitative researching methods to make a comparative study between English classic novel Pride and Prejudice and the Chinese version translated by Wang Keyi. Through the analysis to the linguistic data, it shows that:1) there are great many similarities in the respect of orientation, value, polarity and type in the two versions. In the meanwhile, we also find that large numbers of differences exit in the English and Chinese versions.2) the thesis probes into the possible reasons leading to those differences, that is, adaptation to target readers, domestication and translator’s subjectivity. Through our study, it can enrich the pragmatic theories through the application of Halliday’s theory of metaphor of modality to the interpretation of the literary text Pride and Prejudice. In addition, it is helpful for the language learners to grasp the target-language culture and facilitate the English language teaching and learning.