Grammatical Metaphor In English For Petroleum Science And Technology (EPST) Texts And Its English-Chinese Translation

Functional linguistics holds the idea that grammatical metaphor originates from the re-matching of semantics and lexciogrammar, which is regarded as an important semantic resource for people to reconstruct experience. Scientific discourse is the one reinterpretation and reconstruction of common sense, in which grammatical metaphor plays an important part. This thesis aims at studying the grammatical metaphor in English for petroleum science and technology (hereinafter referred to as EPST) text, and discusses the guidance function of grammatical metaphor theory in the process of translation.Halliday, leader of systematic functional school, puts forward the concept of grammatical metaphor in his masterpiece An Introduction to Functional Grammar in1985. Based on the three meta-functions of language, he classifies grammatical metaphor into two categories:ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. On the basis of Halliday’s study, Martin, another leader of systematic functional school, believes that textual metaphor should be included in grammatical metaphor. With the continuance of the research and the development of the theory, Halliday makes a great adjustment to grammatical metaphor and gives birth to the concept of grammatical metaphor syndrome. Based on this, he reclassifies grammatical metaphor into13types in which all class-shifts and rank-shifts are covered. The newly classified grammar metaphor, which enjoys a larger coverage and a stronger interpretation, provides a new scientific angle for researchers to analyze and study English for science and technology.Besides the introduction and conclusion, four chapters are included in this thesis. Chapter one presents a literature review of grammatical metaphor theory, especially the theory developed by Halliday. Chapter Two introduces the features of English for petroleum science and technology texts and its translation. Chapter Three is data collection and data analysis. Based on Halliday’s new classification of grammatical metaphor, the author chooses six texts from petroleum technical English series at random and makes a statistic analysis of the occurrence frequency of each type of grammatical metaphor in sample texts. The results of data analysis indicate that nominalization is the most frequently used type of grammatical metaphor and the frequency of adjectivization ranks second. According to detailed and comprehensive analysis, the function of grammatical metaphor in English for science and technology texts is reiterated. The existence of grammatical metaphor strengthens the objectivity and conciseness of scientific texts. However, it also incurs more difficulties for readers to understand it. Therefore, Chapter Four discusses how to use grammatical metaphor theory in the translation of English for petroleum science and technology texts.