Research On Grammatical Metaphor Distributions And Functions In Civil Aviation English Discourse From A Cognitive Perspective

The study for metaphor has a long history which can be traced back to the time of Aristotle in ancient Greece.As the founder of Systematic Functional Linguistics,Halliday put forward the concept of Grammatical Metaphor(GM)in 1985 and made a detailed and systematic illustration of it from the perspective of Functional Grammar,which enriched the theory of Functional Grammar,extended the research scope of metaphor.Additionally,it also provided a new perspective for metaphor research and offered another path for discourse analysis.In light of the three meta-functions of language,Halliday classified GM into Ideational Metaphor and Interpersonal Metaphor.With the development of research,Halliday proposed the notion of grammatical metaphor syndrome and reclassified the GM into 13 types which included all the types of rank shift and class shift in 1996.This kind of reclassification enlarges the reach of coverage and improves the explanatory power.Based on the theory of GM,this paper uses the qualitative and quantitative analysis to qualitatively identify and quantitatively count the 13 types of GM in Civil Aviation English Discourse so as to display the distribution pattern and textual features;in addition,the cognitive functions of GM in Civil Aviation English Discourse will be illustrated on a large number of examples.The study shows that there are indeed a lot of GM in Civil Aviation English Discourse,but the 13 types are not evenly distributed,especially the four re-categorized types,namely Nominalization,Adjectivization,Verbalization and Prepositionization.Similar with the common EST Discourse,Nominalization,one of the important ways to achieve GM,occupies a comparatively large proportion in the Discourse.It is much more than Verbalization and Prepositionization.What differs from other EST Discourse is that Adjectivization becomes the main transformation method to realize GM in Civil Aviation English Discourse and its distribution and numbers are far more persuasive and much more thanthe other three categories combined.To some extent,Adjectivization is the unique feature of Civil Aviation English.From the perspective of cognitive function,the massive use of GM does not increase the difficulty of discourse understanding;instead,it is convenient for readers to grasp the key points,clarify author's intended thoughts and play an important role in Civil Aviation English Discourse understanding.Besides,those carefully illustrated functions would cast a new version for aviation teaching.