A Study On The Stylistic Value Of Grammatical Metaphor In Walden

As an important part of Systemic Functional Grammar,the introduction of“Grammatical Metaphor” provides a “top-down” angle for metaphor research,and further promotes the study of “metaphor” from the perspective of functional grammar.Previous discourse analysis based on grammatical metaphor tended to focus on texts with obvious genre characteristics such as scientific texts,news reports,advertisements,etc.,but few on prose.However,as a common textual genre,prose has formal style,varied language and numerous images,which also involves many grammatical metaphors,and holds huge research significance as well as the above discourses.Therefore,this thesis takes prose as the target genre,adopting the famous transcendental writer Thoreau’s representative work Walden as a research sample.Under the theoretical guidance of Systemic Functional Linguistics,this study conducts a statistical analysis of the grammatical metaphors in this book,including their distribution,structural characteristics and the stylistic value of each type of metaphor.The study proves that grammatical metaphor is ubiquitous in prose,with various forms.Different metaphorical mechanisms produce various stylistic effects.Firstly,in the genre of prose,nominalization is still the most important instantiated form of ideational metaphor,which can improve the formality of prose,enrich the meaning of sentences and promote the semantic coherence of discourse.Secondly,in the ideational metaphor,the transformation of transitive processes often interacts with stylistic rhetoric.For example,mental and verbal processes,which only human beings possess,are often accompanied by the rhetoric device of personification.This kind of phenomenon also conforms to the features of prose,that is,beautiful language and rich rhetoric.Thirdly,interpersonal metaphor is mostly realized in the form of interrogative mood expressing declarative views,which makes the emotional expression of prose more intense.On the other hand,the use of explicit subjective andobjective clauses can increase the appeal and objectivity of the text.Finally,in terms of textual metaphor,because of the free style and inconspicuous logical relations of prose,the proportion of textual metaphors in Walden is small,whose main stylistic value is to streamline the language,to maintain the cohesion and coherence of discourses,and to highlight the textual themes.In short,this thesis is a tentative study on the prose Walden from the perspective of grammatical metaphor,which extends the research areas of grammatical metaphor and provides reference for the analysis of prose under the functional linguistic perspective.