An Exploration On Chinese EFL Learners' Grammatical Metaphor Development

As a primary feature of academic language,grammatical metaphor facilitates the development of argumentation and boosts the objectivity,authority,logicality and economy,and thus is crucial for promoting academic writing and producing favorable cognitive effects.In recent years,theoretical and empirical researches on grammatical metaphor and its deployment in academic discourse increasingly expand and enrich.Nonetheless,investigations on grammatical metaphor development characteristics from academic language perspective are very limited,let alone empirical studies on development features of grammatical metaphor among Chinese advanced English learners.This research focuses on five linguistic doctors as research object and takes their theses and dissertations from master to doctors' stage(10 in total)as research data.The five subjects have graduated from top-rank domestic universities in recent five years and their graduation theses were all completed in English.In each sample,the abstract and conclusion parts are excerpted to establish corpora.With the aid of the statistical software SPSS 19.0,the research combines quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and makes a survey on the grammatical metaphor deployment in the five subjects' graduation theses.By probing into the following three research questions,the thesis aims to reveal the development characteristics of grammatical metaphor deployment by Chinese advanced English learners.1.What grammatical metaphor distribution tendencies do the five subjects' graduation theses demonstrate? 2.Are there any differences on means of grammatical metaphor realization in the five subjects' graduation theses? 3.What grammatical metaphor development features do the five subjects' graduation writings demonstrate from master to doctor's stage?This research achieves the following findings: 1.With respect to standard frequency,the grammatical metaphor deployment demonstrates an overall increasing tendency from master to doctor's graduation theses.Specifically,nominalization accounts for the largest proportion followed by textual metaphor and interpersonal metaphor appears scarcely.(1)Among the five types of nominalization,verbal nominalization and adjective nominalization hold the most frequencies and the other three types are rarely employed.(2)As to interpersonal metaphor,metaphor of mood is completely detached from the academic writings and metaphor of modality appears sporadically.(3)In terms of textual metaphor,cohesive devices metaphor keeps the most frequencies,next by information structural metaphor and theme structure metaphor is the least observed one.Despite the fact that cohesive devices metaphor appears frequently,textual metaphor demonstrates an overall monotonous deployment and almost a repetition of high-frequency words.2.By T-Test statistics,obvious differences are observed in deployment of grammatical metaphor and subcategories between master and doctor's group,indicating that subjects' grammatical metaphor competence demonstrates remarkable improvement.3.By Chi-Square Test,extremely significant differences are observed in deployment of grammatical metaphor and subcategories in both masters and doctors' group,which manifests great individual disparities in grammatical metaphor competence and academic writing skills among master and doctor groups.The above findings indicate that: 1.From master to doctor's stage,a general improvement on grammatical metaphor deployment is detected.However,monotony on nominalization and textual metaphor usage results in a lack of variety and richness in language expression.During the master and doctor's stages,the subjects avoid using metaphor of mood thoroughly and restrain usage of explicit subjective expressions,indicating that they have cultivated satisfactory style consciousness and taken the objectivity of academic writing into consideration.Nonetheless,the subjects still appear to be conservative on explicit objective expressions.2.With respect to individual development,remarkable improvement is observed in grammatical metaphor employment and thus substantial promotion is achieved by the individuals from master to doctor's stage.3.The significant differences among master and doctor groups reveal that even in higher degree stages,masters and doctors' academic proficiencies still display wide individual gap and thus there remains still great space for improvement on grammatical metaphor production competence and academic writing skills.The findings provide new evidence for situation of grammatical metaphor deployment by Chinese advanced English learners and serve as supplement for empirical researches on grammatical metaphor.Meanwhile,this research extends enlightenment on foreign language teaching and academic proficiency promotion.