A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In The Discourse Of Science And Technology

Owing to its high abstractness and complexity, scientific discourse is always difficult to language learner and interesting to linguists. However, according to logical positivism held by most scholars in linguistic school, science should be described in literal language, never concerning metaphor—a typical means of rhetoric. But the studies of systemic-functional linguistics evoke other scholar’s interest to argue about the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor (GM) in scientific discourse.Halliday (1985) is the first person who brings forth the concept of grammatical metaphor. According to the three metafunctions of language, Halliday initially classified grammatical metaphor into two types:ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. After over ten years" constant improvement and amendments, Halliday (1996) finally puts forward the notion of Grammatical Metaphor Syndrome (GMS). The proposition of this new notion indicates that Halliday make essential adjustment to initial system grammatical metaphor, which is made by Halliday in1985. Meanwhile, Halliday entrusts new meaning to GM and enrich the theory of GM. Based on this new notion, Halliday reclassifies GM into13types, thus break the constraint of old classification held by traditional linguistics. It is this redefinition and classification that gives us a powerful mechanism.In this thesis, we would take Halliday’s new mode classification of grammatical metaphor as theoretical preliminary to analyze the phenomenon of GM, by analyzing six English scientific discourses which are chosen from the international magazine SCIENCE, ranging from physics to chemistry. According to statistical analysis of our corpus, the author take a further step to discuss the phenomenon of GM and what the most favorite type is and what function they fulfill in constructing scientific discourse. The author finds that nominalization is a distinctive grammar phenomenon in scientific discourse. It can strengthen succinctness and conciseness of the structure of clause in scientific discourse. Besides, adjectivization is also pervasive in scientific discourse, secondly only to nominalization. Therefore, better understanding of GM which makes a contribution to the constructing of scientific discourse, not only decreases the difficulty of reading scientific discourse and remove the barrier set by it, but also provides some reference for our English scientific discourse teaching. Study of Grammatical metaphor is considered as an important part in exploration of metaphor. Therefore, this study is very important and valuable for us to explore the phenomena of GM, have a much better understanding the property of language, and furthermore predict the trend of language and the human cognitive development.