The Comparative Analysis Of The Story Of The Stone Two English Versions From The Perspective Of Grammar Metaphor

Metaphor，as a widespread language phenomenon, is discussed by many linguists inancient Greek. Systemic functional linguists represented by Halliday believe that metaphorexists not only on the lexical level but also on the grammatical level. In1985, Halliday firstlyproposed the theory of grammatical metaphor in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar.Ever since Halliday put forward “grammatical metaphor”(GM) in his book An Introductionto Functional Grammar. The theory has caught many linguists’ attention and became a hotresearch subject. Meanwhile, this theory is also applied in the research of different kinds oftexts. Acknowledged as one of the best masterpieces in world literature, The Story of theStone attracts its readers both home and abroad with its unique charm. And its differenttranslation versions go to the world, spreading the Chinese cultural. There are a lot ofresearches about its English version. But we find by looking up data that in these researchesthere is no research done from the view of Grammatical Metaphor.This paper adopts the method of document, comparative analysis and examples analysis.Mainly based on Halliday’s GM theory and original version and its two most authoritativeEnglish versions as data: translated by Yang Xiang-yi and his wife Gladys Yang and DavidHawkes, the paper compares and analyses two English versions of The Story of the Stone.This paper researches the research situation of the GM and English versions of The Story ofthe Stone at home and abroad by adopting the method of document and put forward creativepoint of this paper. The main part of this paper compares and analyses two English versionsof The Story of the Stone from the perspective of the ideational GM and interpersonal GM bythe method of comparative analysis and example analysis. This part analyses why translatoruse metaphor form or congruent form in translation and which form is better. At last, throughanalyzing two versions how to choose the congruent and metaphor, we conclude that GM hassome enlightenment for literary translation:1. using the GM faithfully reappears the originaltext and GM exerts great impact on the conveyance of meaning in discourse and can be usedin the literary translation;2. GM doesn’t adopt all these text translation. In translation of sometexts congruent form is better than metaphor, so when adopting metaphor we should makeconcrete analysis about text;3. When facing the difficulty of literary translation and multiplechoices, GM offers a new research perspective for literary translation studies.