| Popular science discourse aims to popularize scientific knowledge which is abundance in contents and multiplicity in forms including encyclopedias,popular science digests,and history of science.English popular science discourse,being one of the varieties of scientific discourse,is distinctive in describing natural science knowledge which not only shows much concern over the description of scientific knowledge,but also targets to its readability,humanity and scientificity.Among numerous English popular science discourses,the encyclopedic series launched by Oxford University Press has attracted many readers' attention with its concise and refined language features,distinctive style and rich scientific information.By February 2017,this series covers over 510 different topics and has been translated into more than 25 languages,highly praised by New Yorker,The Guardian and The Times.Darwin as one of the series mainly describes Darwin's life and scientific research work,in which numerous ideational grammatical metaphors and interpersonal grammatical metaphors make it become the powerhouse of scientificity,humanity and readability.In recent years,linguists represented by Halliday focus on the metaphorical phenomenon in scientific discourse,especially the use of grammatical metaphor in the construction of scientific knowledge in experiential world.At present,there are indeed some achievements on the study of English popular science discourse especially in the field of translation,teaching and linguistics,while the exploration of the types and functions of grammatical metaphor in English popular science discourse is still rare.Based on Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory and the self-built corpus,22,745 words whose data are collected from the five core chapters(from chapter 3 to chapter 7)inDarwin,combining the quantitative and qualitative analysis methods,taking Halliday's(1996)reclassification of grammatical metaphor for reference,this thesis explores how the writer skillfully uses different types of ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors to construct English popular science discourse to further realize a sense of readability,humanity and scientificity.In this thesis,Chapter 4 firstly identifies various types of grammatical metaphors which prepares well for Chapter 5 to explore their functions in constructing different scientific facts and phenomena.This thesis provides a great convenience for readers or writers to appreciate,evaluate or compose similar texts.Through analyzing numerous examples and statistics obtained,this research finds that in terms of ideational grammatical metaphors,apart from the most prominent nominalization(especially Type 1(adj.? n.),Type 2(v.? n.))and adjectivization(particularly Type 5(v.? adj.))that produce a sense of technicality and rationality,the writer of Darwin applies a certain proportion of verbalization and prepositionalization as well which realizes the subtle transformation from unstable grammatical class to relatively stable ones and facilitates the construction and description of constant scientific facts and phenomena.In addition,the participation of various types of grammatical metaphor works mutually,simplifies the grammatical structure of sentences but increases the lexical density and further enriches the loaded meaning of the metaphorical expressions.In other words,the application of different types of ideational grammatical metaphor constructs the technicality,logicality and coherence of scientific discourse,which to some extent,establishes the writer's own authority and distances the writer from his readers.The participation of interpersonal metaphor,especially metaphors of mood,lessens the tension between the writer and the reader skillfully.In Darwin,the writer gives a large number of facts by means of questioning,naturally interacts with readers and arouses their thinking by putting forward some questions directly,but without waiting for long the writer answers all these questions himself which suddenly relives readers' tightened nerves.Finally,when it comes to metaphors of modality,the writer aptly and repeatedly uses metaphor of the objective-explicit modality to wrap his own point of view so as to produce a seemingly non-negotiable sense of fact.It can be said that using metaphor ofsubjective-explicit modality in Darwin is the biggest characteristics,since this book is an introductory popular science reading about Darwin and his major theories,and in order to avoid unnecessary controversies caused by subjective conjecture,the writer tends to quote Darwin's statements directly,which do account for a large number of metaphor of the subjective-explicit modality,to further evaluate Darwin and his scientific work. |
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