A Contrastive Analysis Of The Grammatical Metaphor In The Original And Simplified Versions Of Pride And Prejudice

This thesis conducts a contrastive analysis between Jane Austin’s original versionof Pride and Prejudice and Clare West’s simplified one on the basis of the theory ofgrammatical metaphor in systemic-functional linguistics.Metaphor exists widely in our lives. It has long been a favored research topicamong linguists. The earliest research on metaphor can be traced back to the ancientGreek times. From ancient times to the present, different theories of metaphor havebeen put forward, but only on the lexical level. Grammatical metaphor is regarded asthe milestone of researches on metaphor because it is the only theory that discussesmetaphor on the grammatical level. Since then, many linguists begin to pay closeattention to grammatical metaphor and apply it to analyzing different types of text,such as news, contracts, legal discourse and speeches.In this research, the author tries to apply grammatical metaphor to studying anovel. And a contrastive analysis will be carried out. Our data are collected from theoriginal and simplified versions of Pride and Prejudice, the latter of which is writtenfor children and introduced for foreign language learners. Rationale for this researchis that grammatical metaphor is sensitive to tenor. That is to say, target readers of atext determine its use of grammatical metaphor. Halliday (1985:321) believes that“metaphorical modes of expression are characteristic of all adult discourse” and “theonly examples of discourse without metaphor are young children’s speech”. Besidesthe factor of age, grammatical metaphor is also closely related to the readers’language proficiency. Manipulation of grammatical metaphor is “particularlyimportant in the context of teaching both children and foreign learners, who may havedifficulty in mastering the resource”(Ravelli,1988:146). This research is expected tofind out the different use of grammatical metaphor in the two versions of Pride andPrejudice. Throughout this research, the following questions will be raised andanswered:(1) What are the differences between these two versions in utilizing grammaticalmetaphor?(2) Why does the original version largely use grammatical metaphor?(3) What purpose does the simplified version want to achieve when rewritingthe metaphorical forms and expressions in the original version into theircorresponding congruent forms and expressions? The findings are that grammatical metaphors exist widely in the original versionand Jane Austin makes full use of grammatical metaphors to achieve specific artisticeffects. In simplified version, most grammatical metaphors are decoded to theircongruent forms in order to meet the special need of target readers. Meanwhile, it hasbeen proved that the use of grammatical metaphor is influenced by the age andlanguage proficiency of target readers.