英语论文网

 A Study on the Written Textual Function of Grammatical Metaphor and Quality of College Students’ English Writing

Chapter 1 Introduction
 This chapter serves as a brief introduction to the background of the study, the objective and significance of the study, and finally followed by the general framework of the paper.
Background of the study
 The metaphor study has a very long history and the earliest interpretation of metaphor can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose definition of metaphor as transference of lexical meaning for achieving rhetorical and poetical value set the tone for scores of generations in their metaphor study. For a long time, metaphor was a topic of interest exclusively for rhetoricians, no different from any other figures of speech such as metonymy, personification, hyperbole and synecdoche. And in the declining years of traditional rhetoric it was even considered simply ornamental in function(Ricoeur,1977科学语篇的隐喻性P1). To make matters worse, the long western tradition of semantic study was just on the lexical level. With mankind stepping into the twentieth century, cognitive linguistics Ladoff and Johnson(1980:3同上P4)resisting the surrounding pressures of pure thinking, demonstrate convincingly that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action”. The regard metaphor as a kind of cognitive mechanism and a tool for human to ideate and comprehend the surrounding world. In modern times, the study of metaphor is no longer the unique enterprise of rhetoricans. Meanwhile, we should observe that the study of metaphor is still bound to the lexical and sentential levels and most scholars’ points of view regarding metaphor is inevitably too narrow in scope to offer a complete picture of human beings as an animal with distinctive capacity for metaphorization(Yan,1995 P5). The task of breaking this bondage is taken up by M.A.K.Halliday who firstly put forward Grammatical Metaphor theory in his book “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” in 1985, which marked the beginning of the theoretical study on Grammatical Metaphor. His study indicated that the phenomenon of metaphor happened not only on the lexical level but also on the lexico-grammatical level. According to Halliday and Martin, Grammatical Metaphor includes Ideational Grammatical Metaphor, Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor and Textual Grammatical Metaphor.
 Much work has been done on Grammatical Metaphor since the theory raised by Halliday. Ravelli(2003课题中)believed that Grammatical Metaphor was the core in written text especially in the text of science and academic. Most of scholars(Hu zhuanglin,同上)have the viewpoint that Ideational Metaphor and Textual Metaphor are more popular in written text, which can add conciseness, coherence, objectivity, precision and vividness to English discourse.