Ideational Grammatical Metaphors In Relational Processes And Their Cognitive Construals

Relational process,which serves to characterize and to identify,is one of the major processes of transitivity system in Systemic Functional Linguistics.According to the types of attributes,relational process is divided into intensive,circumstantial and possessive types,each of which is subdivided into attributive and identifying modes.Because of the complexity of its classification,relational process arose great concerns from systemists.Halliday's classification of relational process engendered intense discussions which are pertinent to the necessity of distinguishing type and mode,the priority of type and mode and the fuzziness among subtypes generated from six interlaced combinations of two modes and three types.The sporadic literature on relational processes is generally confined to the amelioration of its classification.But they haven't studied the grammatical transferences across relational processes and the other processes,the fuzziness within relational process and the transferences caused by the fuzziness.This thesis revisited relational process of Halliday's transitivity system,and established a cognitive-functional model by which the system of ideational grammatical metaphors in relational processes(IGMs in RPs)and their cognitive construal were explored.And then,the study discussed their significance in representing human's experience.This thesis focuses on the following three questions:(a)How do relational processes reconstrue human experience?(b)What are the cognitive motivations of IGMs in RPs?(c)What are the semantic functions realized by these reconstruals? All the material employed for analysis comes from British National Corpus and relevant linguistic monographs and papers.Based on Halliday's explanation of IGM,the present study established a cognitive-functional model towards relational process,which helped to systematically describe the types of IGMs in RPs,to reveal the potential cognitive motivations and to present the semantic functions that could be realized.Major findings of this thesis include:Firstly,both sub-processes and trans-processes transferences are in accordance with the concept of IGM.IGMs across subtypes of relational processes can be divided into six types.They are transferences between intensive and circumstantial types,transferences between intensive and possessive types and that between circumstantial and possessive types.IGMs across processes can be divided into four types.They are transferences from material process,mental process,behavior process and verbal process to relational process.Secondly,motivations of IGMs in RPs are related to cognitive parameters in Construal Theory.It is found that IGMs in RPs are accompanied by specificity decrease.They achieve different scope activations and facilitate different profilings.And they could realize the adjustment of prominence arrangement and vantage point.However,Sub-type GMs in RPs are irrelevant to dynamicity,while trans-process GMs in RPs could turn temporal event into atemporal relation.Thirdly,the motifs of IGMs in RPs are reconstructions of meanings.The reconstruction of ideational meaning turns original meanings into more abstract ones by adjusting parameters of Construal,so as to increase the lexical density for lager information capacity and to decrease the number of semantic units from original process.Therefore,the Specificity tends to be lower;Focusing tends to be a lager scope;and Profiling tends to be a more complete unit or relation.But the reconstruction of textual meaning shows its motif in the improvement of discourse coherence and information influence through perspective switching.This thesis contributes to(a)extending the study area of relational process and providing new content to the theory of transitivity,especially to the study of transitivity metaphors;it also(b)shows its significance in the theoretical support for English pedagogy and study,such as academic writing and material compilation.