A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions With Favorable Denotation From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Metaphor

Adverbial conjunctions(“ACs” for short),as an important kind of words,are gradually entering the scope of heated academic study.The interpersonal metaphor within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar also catches scholars' attention for a long time.But it is rarely seen that people study English and Chinese ACs from the perspective of interpersonal metaphor,especially metaphor of modality and make a comparative analysis between them.This thesis focuses on studying the metaphorical features of such ACs as fortunately,luckily,happily and xinghao(??),xingkui(??),haozai(??).The research is based on a corpus made up of 200 examples of each word,which are taken from BNC(British National Corpus)and CCL(Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU)respectively.The author carries out a qualitative analysis of metaphorical expressions containing ACs and tries to find out their metaphorical characteristics.Meanwhile,a quantitative study is also made concerning the frequency of using ACs and metaphor of modality together.Chapter one briefly introduces background of the study,study methods,organization of the thesis and its purpose as well as significance.Chapter two tells readers the previous research of interpersonal metaphor and ACs.Next comes the main body,i.e.chapter three,four and five.Some metaphorical features are discussed about the English and Chinese ACs such as features of type,orientation and value.And in chapter five a comparative analysis is described toward these metaphorical characteristics between English and Chinese ACs.The last part is conclusion in chapter six,which contains the main findings,limitations of the thesis and suggestions for further study.Through analysis,it is found that:1.The pair“luckily-??(xingkui)”shows up most frequently in metaphorical expressions,followed by“fortunately-??(xinghao)”and“happily-??(haozai)”.2.All of these ACs appear most often in metaphorical contexts with the type feature of probability.3.Concerning the distribution of subjective and objective forms,it is roughly equal as to“happily”while Chinese ACs show preference to objective forms and their English counterparts carry totally different features in the other two pairs.4.The study shows a strong link between favorable ACs and metaphors with the median value.The thesis intends to improve the deficient study of ACs from the perspective of interpersonal metaphor.The research result will provide some reference for translation of English and Chinese metaphors of modality,offers a new angle for AC teaching and help readers comprehend literary works more precisely.Besides,it hopes that the analysis and explanation can benefit the rule and theory descriptions in Chinese and English teaching.