A Study On The Types And Functions Of Adjectivisation In Grammatical Metaphor

Grammatical metaphor is a major concept of the systemic-functional linguistics, whose significance has been gradually acknowledged by many linguists. In Hallidayan grammatical metaphor theory, metaphor refers to variation in the expression of meanings more than the lexical selection. There is a strong grammatical element in the metaphorical variation by replacing one grammatical category or grammatical form with another one and not by replacing one word with another lexical item in a literal form. According to Halliday, nominalization is by far the most frequent type of grammatical metaphor, especially in scientific discourse. However,Halliday later points out that it is wrong to equate grammatical metaphor with nominalizatSon,since there are other types of grammatical metaphor such as verbalization and adjectivization besides nominallzation. However, the previous discussions on the relation between adjectivization and grammatical metaphor has been largely Ignored. For the purpose of giving a more detailed and comprehensive picture of grammatical metaphor, mis thesis attempts to explore the following issues: (?) more detailed information on types of grammatical metaphor,(?) nature and mechanism of adjectivization, (?) types and functions of adjectivization.Based on Halliday's grammatical metaphor and with food English texts as its research corpus, this thesis is devoted to the study of adjectivization, its types and its fractions, using the methods of document consultation, qualitative and quantitative techniques in a systematic and comprehensive way. Concretely, the author of this thesis makes a tentative effort to investigate the nature of adjectivization and its mechanism, the five shifts of adjectivization according to grammatical shift in class — the shift from verb to adjective, the shift from preposition(prepositional phrase) to adjective, the shift from adverb to adjective, the shift from conjunction to adjective and the shift from noun to adjective — as well as the functions of adjectivization and its application in food English texts. The research result shows that adjectivization is another vital representation and means of grammatical metaphor, and that adjectivization can render language expression more economical and concise, information more objective and authentic, discourse more coherent and cohesive, as well as text more condensed and technical meaning more distillated, which has a positive effect upon the realization of scientific English stylistic features.