A Systemic-functional Approach To Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And English Nursery Rhymes

The theory of Grammatical Metaphor （GM）was firstly put forward by M.A.K.Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in1985. His study on GM canbe considered as the beginning of conscious study of Grammatical Metaphor which is thetheoretical guidance for the present study.This study makes an analysis of grammatical metaphor in nursery rhymes from theperspective of Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Most of the previous studies have a closerelationship with rhetoric or cognition. When it comes to metaphor of nursery rhyme,according to Halliday, usually, it is the language of young children in which nometaphorical discourse occurs. This study seeks to explicate more fully the manner in whichthese lexicogrammatical patterns develop. Such an exploration may enhance our potentialfor fostering children’s understanding and experience of literacy-related language patterns.The intention of this study is to explore possible evidence of the existence of grammaticalmetaphor in the language of young children-nursery rhyme, which means children learnprobably many equally complex systems as that of human language. We study thedevelopment of child language from the perspective of systemic functional grammar, whichmeans the association with children’s language acquisition and other knowledge or skillsthrough this kind of language acquisition. The research of children’s language developmentfrom the perspective of systemic functional grammar reflects the real motivation ofchildren’s language acquisition and the process of children’s language development.Nursery Rhyme is a short, rhymed, usually traditional verse or song for young children.It is a kind of easy and understandable poetry which is suitable for infants and youngchildren and is firstly contacted and most acceptable literary style for infants and youngchildren, which are characteristics shared by nursery rhyme in different languages. Thus, thesamples for analysis in this study are collected from two publications in English andChinese, namely, Mother Goose and儿歌三百首.These samples are analyzed from the perspective of systemic functional grammar toprobe into language phenomena of the lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor innursery rhyme. First the quantitative method is used to calculate the numbers of metaphorsfrom the samples. Then the qualitative method is used to interpret how the phenomenon ofgrammatical metaphor is realized in both Chinese and English nursery rhymes. Based on the statistical analysis of the samples, it is found that grammatical metaphordoes exist in both Chinese and English nursery rhymes. Each type of grammatical metaphoris different in distribution and plays a different role in organizing children discourse.Lexical metaphor as a subcategory of metaphors in the rank of group is found to be a typicalfeature in Chinese nursery rhymes, meanwhile there are a large number of application ofideational and interpersonal metaphor in English nursery rhymes, which means thatnominalization and metaphor of mood play an important role in construing English childrendiscourse. Both languages have the same features that children learn probably complexsystems as that of human language gradually. They help children understand this cognitiveworld made up by metaphor with the process of acquiring metaphors in nursery rhymes.Children gradually adopt these taken-for-granted metaphors into their own meaning system.