英美文学评论著作中隐喻研究和启示

Introduction

This thesis is aimed at investigating the grammatical metaphorical distribution patterns ,the operating mechanism of grammatical metaphor (hereafter abbreviated as GM) in literarycritical essays (hereafter abbreviated as LCEs), and the stylistic value of the GM distributionpattern. A corpus-based analysis of the distribution of GM in literary critical essays will beconducted to find out what the operating mechanism of GM in those chosen articles is;whether the investigation of the incongruent distribution lexicogrammatical resources can beutilized to reveal a significant means of foregrounding, thus constituting an important aspectof style markers; what the implications of the current study is to have a better understandingand composition of LCEs for those intended readers and would-be writers. Metaphor has long been a fascinating and controversial issue in linguistic study. Intraditional rhetoric study, metaphor is approached as a figure of speech which is parallel tosimile, synecdoche and metonymy, exploiting the substitution of the expression of one thingfor a similar notion. From the point view of modern linguistics, however, metaphor is notmerely treated as a lexical matter, a shifting and displacement of words; rather, it ismechanism of human thought involving the attribution of certain features from one thing (i.e.vehicle) to another (i.e. tenor). Some linguists, take Lakoff&Johnson(1980) for example,define metaphor as an essential mechanism with which human beings conceptualize theirexperience of the world.Generally speaking, traditional approaches to metaphor are more or less confined to theperspective of lexical level. Halliday, believes that metaphorical variation can not only occurat lexical level, but at lexicogrammatical level as well. Halliday (1985, 321) first proposes thenotion of grammatical metaphor to designate that metaphorical expressions involvelexicogrammatical transferences from one kind to another. He (2004:233) also holds the viewthat lexical and grammatical metaphors are not two different phenomena but are “ bothaspects of the same general metaphorical strategy by which we expand our semantic resources for construing experience.”In his series of articles concerning Language of Science, Halliday (1966, 1987, 1988,1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999) expounds the process of how common language hasbeen transformed into science language. A great many basic category words have beentransformed into scientific English words through which the characteristics of abstractness,objectivity and high lexical density have been embodied.The breakthroughs in science and technology in the early 20thsoon exerted greatinfluences over humanity research and study, and scientism once became a fashion in literarystudy. It is a kind of philosophy through which research and study are carried out from theperspective of natural science, principles and methodology, which emphasizes objectivity,accuracy and scientificness.In contemporary literary criticism, “ linguistic turn” first appeared in literary essays fromthe perspective of scientism. From Russian Formalism, Prague school, new criticism, tostructuralism, semiotics and to deconstructionism, though their specific theories and views aredifferent from each other, they all put linguistic view in the centre of their study and research.Zhu Gang (2006:8) states that the methods prevalent in scientific discourse have exerted greatinfluence over western literary criticism characterized by diversified studies, systematicresearch and specialization, and that the breakthroughs in science have spread in literary studyand scientism has soon found its way in literary criticism. Scientific discourse which fullyemploys grammatical metaphor to achieve its goal must have an effect on essays on westernliterary criticism in the ideational expression, construction of interpersonal meanings andtextual organization.Since the introduction of the notion of grammatical metaphor, little empirical researchhas been done to investigate what the distribution patterns of GM are in LCEs, whether theGM patterns may endow any stylistic value with LCE discourse (since there has been norelevant study to investigate whether LCE can be treated as an independent style), whatimplications readers of LCEs can gain from the investigation of GM, for it is alwaysmurderously difficult for graduates to fully understand those professional essays and what implications can be of help to those would-be writers to compose articles pertinent to literarycriticism. It is against this background that the current study embarks. LCEs has long been treated as a general type of written language and has not been givenenough attention from the perspective of linguistics. In English teaching, LCEs have beenapproached from the perspective of reading comprehension for higher level intensive readingand short passage writing in exams. In recent years, with the exchange and communication inlinguistic study and literary criticism between China and western world deepening, morecriticism materials have been introduced and those materials are often quite difficult tounderstand and interpret even for graduates. So the author believes that LCEs deservesresearch from linguistic point of view so that the rules underlying sentence patterns in thosetexts of criticism can be found and is of help for language teaching.
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Chapter Two Theoretical Framework of Research Proceduresand Data Analysis

2.1Introduction of the materials for corpus
The set of books The Cambridge Companion was introduced into mainland of China byShangHai Foreign Language Education Press from University of Cambridge. Right now, thisset of books includes 40 books, the content of which is associated with 33 famous British andAmerican writers in history, studies about Greek Tragedy, English poetry,Eighteenth-Century Novel, British Romanticism, Modernism, American Realism andNaturalism, American Women Playwrights, Australian Literature, and Jewish AmericanLiterature. The writers of the articles in the book are distinguished scholars and experts intheir own fields. Take the book The Cambridge Companion to modernism for example. Itexamines the different aspects of modernist thought and culture that have had a significantimpact on contemporary cultural thinking and production. Topics discussed by experts in thefield include modernism’s relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance toliterature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. This is anessential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in modernism inall its incarnations. Thus the book can be regarded as the most representative and authoritativecritical articles of English literature.

2.2 Data collection and analysis procedures
To ensure that the findings can be representative and 40 pieces of essays with differenttopics from 40 books were chosen randomly as objects to be studied.The analysis procedures are in two stages. First, ideational GM and interpersonal GM inthe chosen critical essays are identified in their quantity. The former is to be further ascertained what transferences of transitivity are involved in the formation of ideational GM;the latter is studied to find what mechanism is involved in the process of forminginterpersonal GM, so that it can be concluded whether GM has been a prominent features ofmodern literature critical article, what are the internal mechanism to make GM possible inthose essays to be studied and whether the GM pattern can enable LCEs to possess distinctstylistic markers. Cases of nominalization and word density are to be explained in qualitativemethod in order to find out whether nominalization, as Halliday proclaimed, is “the singlemost powerful way of forming GM and what is the effect exerted by nominalization on worddensity in those objects to be studied. Besides, items like modal verbs, the value of them andliterature terms will also be marked manually and calculated in the process of theinvestigation. In the second stage, the analysis is characterized with both quantitative andqualitative study, during which the collected data will be presented to show the frequenciesand distribution patterns of GM and then tentative explanations are offered for both ideationalGM and Interpersonal GM. The next stage will be concerned with finding out whether theGM patterns in the materials being investigated enable LCES to attain distinct stylistic valuethrough comparison and contrast with other styles.In his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985, 1994, 2004),Halliday doesn’t mention the existence of textual GM. Some scholars, such as Martin(1992),Thompson (2008), and Huang Guowen (2001) believe there exists textual GM according toHalliday’s three metafunctions of language. Responding to their doubts, Halliday reclassifiedGM in 1998 (as is shown in Chapter two), and three of the 13 types of GM have something todo with what Martin (1992) claims textual GM. The reclassification shows once again thatHalliday has his reservation about the proposal of textual GM, and that Halliday’s attitudetowards this issue is that the phenomenon is the metaphorical way of expression beyond theclause category, which has been indicated by the chapter and title when he first put forwardhis GM theory: “ Beyond the clause: the metaphorical modes of expression(Halliday, 1985),and it shows that GM theory has connections with the three metafunctions, but there are no one-to-one corresponding relations. That is why the author doesn’t include the investigationof textual GM in this current study.

Chapter Three Findings and Discussions on Ideational GM.……………………41

3.1 Ideational metaphors in the chosen articles……………………………………41

3.2 Nominalization in LCEs…………………………53

 Chapter Four Findings and Discussions on Interpersonal GM…65

4.1 Interpersonal GM in the investigated articles……………………65

4.2 values of modality………………………..71

Chapter Five Summary of findings and implications for future study ……….76

5.1 Summary of findings…………………..76

Chapter Four Findings and Discussions on Interpersonal GM inLiterary Critical Essays

4.1 Interpersonal GM in the investigated essays
In order to find out how the writers of those critical essays take advantage ofinterpersonal means to maintain relationship with their readers, counterparts and exertinfluence over them, and whether the interpersonal GM pattern is different from that of otherstyles, making interpersonal GM in LCEs possess distinct stylistic value. Several items havebeen investigated such as, the occurrence of interpersonal GM, the mechanism of theinterpersonal GM and the values of the modal verbs used in the investigated materials. Thefirst is the general picture of ideational GM and interpersonal GM of the investigatedmaterials, which has been generalized in the previous part (4.1 Ideational metaphors in thechosen essays): The following table shows the occurrence of interpersonal GM, ideational GM and thedistribution pattern in the whole GM picture. From the table, it can be seen that ideational GM has played an overwhelminglydominant part in the whole GM picture while interpersonal GM is in decisive minority of thewhole occurrence of GM ranging from the lowest 0% to the highest proportion of 16.00%with an average value of 5.82%, which means that interpersonal GM has been an insignificant role in the proportion of GM. It indicates that the writers of critical essays do not rely verymuch on interpersonal GM to maintain interpersonal relationship. Because of the specialfeatures of LCEs, they are mainly written to fulfill the purpose of justifying the view of thewriter in a certain topic, so that the message to be spread is bound to be in declarative moodof expression. That is why mood GM is rare in critical essays. The following two tables showmore detailed information about mechanism of interpersonal GM in the investigated materials,the type of modal verbs and modal adverbs distributing in the materials and their values in thematerials. The first one gives us a more detailed picture of the mechanism of interpersonalGM: (Article No. stands for Article number, Inter. GM for Interpersonal GM, Sub.mood forsubjunctive mood, Emph. pattern for emphatic pattern, freq. for frequency)The statistics in the table shows that the mode of interpersonal GM is in a pattern ofregular distribution in which the sentence pattern ‘it is adj/noun +that clause’ (50.20%) andthe emphatic pattern ‘it is (was)… that clause’(38.98%) play dominant roles (the sum of themis 89.18%) in the composition of interpersonal GM and other types of interpersonal GM suchas subjunctive mood (7.48%) and the projected sentence pattern ‘I believe/ think that clause’(3.54%) are in rare cases in the composition of interpersonal GM. According to Halliday (1994: 362), ‘The explicitly subjective and explicitly objectiveforms of modality are all strictly speaking metaphorical, since all of them represent themodality as being the subjective proposition.’ Modality in congruent form is represented bymodal verbs, modal adverbs and shows the speaker’s attitude while in its metaphorical modeof expression it is often dressed up as the proposition in explicit subjective expression(‘explicit’ I think…) and implicit objective expression (it is +adj / noun/ participle...thatclause). The former contains the further possibility of making it as if it were not the speaker’spoint of view at all and the latter departs from a main clause with ‘it’ as the subject and themain proposition is the subordinate clause, which covers the speaker’s attitude and point ofview and makes what he/she wants to say more objective, so that the reader will be moreinclined to accept such proposition. For example:41. I think it is fair to say that this has been the dominant wing of Dickinson criticism forthe past twenty-five years or so. (from sample 8)In this example the projected proposition ‘that this has been the dominant wing ofDickinson criticism for the past twenty-five years or so’ has been dressed up twice, thusmaking it more objective. From the table it can be seen that the subjective explicit sentencepattern ‘I believe /think that clause’ is only in rare cases, for the writers of those articles try toavoid the possibility of being considered using subjective mode of expression. The followingexamples are variations of another type of projected proposition: From the table, it can be seen that this type of interpersonal GM, subjunctive mood onlyturns up occasionally in the selected materials with sample 19 as an exception in whichsubjunctive mood is as high as 60% of the total interpersonal GM. Considering the wholeoccurrences of interpersonal GM, 5 cases, it can be safe to say that subjective mood is rare inthe critical essays and they don’t have much impact on the interpersonal relationships.

4.2 Values of modality
Compared with the thousands of words of each essay, the occurrence of modal verbs (an average of 10.3) and modal adverbs(an average of 0.03) is in rare cases, indicating that thewriters of LCEs don’t rely much on modal verbs to maintain the relationship with theirreaders and their counterparts in this particular field. Moreover, it can be seen from thestatistics that low(64.08%) and median(23.30%) values play the dominant role (with a sum of87.38%) in the whole distribution of modal verbs; that there is none of any high value modalverbs in as many as 17 selected articles; that there are only a few cases in which thepercentages of the high values of modal verbs are over 30% with No.29 as high as 50% butthe absolute number is very small compared with the whole sentence number of the articles,so it can be safe to say that those high value modal verbs only play an insignificant role in themaintenance of interpersonal relationship in the selected articles. In accordance withHalliday’s point of view (1998), modal value impacts the interpersonal relationship in theconstruct of a text. Low and median values is helpful to build the relationship through whichthe readers are respected as equals so that the readers’ anxiety can be reduced and the distancebetween the writer and the intended readers shortened, which is helpful for the negotiation ofthe writer and the reader.
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Chapter Five Summary of findings and implication for futurestudy

5.1 Summary of findings
This study has been designed to investigate the functions and mechanism of grammaticalmetaphor in the special genre, literary critical essays. Qualitative and quantitative methodshave been employed to investigate the distribution of ideational and interpersonal GM in theselected materials. On the basis of the results, the author went on further to reveal the stylisticvalue of them through the methods of comparison and contrast.On the basis of investigation of the ideational GM and interpersonal GM, the followingconclusions can be drawn:(i) GM is a distinct linguistic feature for LCEs and in all the investigated objects above athird of sentences(36.89%) have been employed the technique of GM and the proportion insome of the essays can even reach as high as 50%, indicating that GM has already become anindispensable feature of LCEs. In terms of the composition of GM, ideational GM has playedan important role and in most cases the dominant role.Through the investigation of the internal mechanism of those ideational GM, it can befound that there is the possibility of inter-transfiguration between different processes; that inthe transfiguration of experiential processes, other processes tend to be transferred torelational process characterized with nominalization as the identified and the identifier; andthat this type of transfiguration has played an significant role in composition of ideational GM(with an average value of 80.56% of the total number of the ideational GM). Thoseessays writers tend to adopt what Halliday (1998) regarded as the “favorite clause type” inscientific discourse. This type of transfiguration tends to relationalize experiential processesin the following steps.This process can explain the reason why there have been so many transfigurations ofrelationalization. This “favorite clause type” facilitates the reasoning process and expansionof the whole discourse.(ii)Nominalization is another distinct feature of ideational GM, through whichexperiential meaning has been transferred into entities so that they can be measured, modifiedand utilized to expand meaning potential. Lexical density is an important parameter ofnominalization, for lexical density usually tends to rise with the effect of nominalization andlexical density is usually between four and six per clause in written language. But in thisinvestigation, though the ration of nominalization per clause is as high as 127.36%, the lexicaldensity of selected essays are ranging from from 5.14 per clause to 3.49 per clause, with anaverage value of 4.27. A tentative explanation of this phenomenon is that the critics of LCEson the one hand employ nominalization to condense more information in the clauses andutilize more complex sentence structures on the other hand, causing lexical density decrease.The advantage is that other types of word class can be transferred into nouns with morepackaged information which can not only expand meaning potential, but make theinformation to be conveyed more objectified, for nouns are more stable and can be easilymodified and expanded structurally as well. However, there is also disadvantage thatnominalization can at the same time increase the ambiguity and complexity of the meaning tobe conveyed.(iii) From the results, it can be concluded that in terms of stylistic value LCEs has itsdistinct features, characterized with abundant transfiguration of experiential processes torelational process from other experiential processes, with abundant occurrence ofnominalization and with comparatively low lexical density.Interpersonal metaphor is another important feature of LCEs though it doesn’t have dominant position in the paramount distribution of GM. Though their numbers are relativelysmall, the mechanism of interpersonal GM that the information to be conveyed is oftenpackaged into an proposition by means of ‘it is + adjective / noun / participle + that clause’and emphatic sentence pattern shows that the critics spare no efforts to make what they havecomposed more objective and avoid subjectivity as much as possible. Through quantifiedstudy, it can be found that critics of those essays tend to use low and median value of modalverbs.On the basis of comparison and contrast with other types of styles, it can be found thatLCEs possess distinct stylistic value in terms of ideational GM and interpersonal GM.

5.2 Implications of the investigation
The most important implication of this investigation comes from the fact that LCEs is anew style which needs to be investigated further in a comprehensive way. More itemsconcerning functional stylistics such as transitivity, passivization, person shift, mood,theme-rheme progression and other items, should be investigated further to find out thedistinct features of LCEs.The next important implication for the present investigation lies in the pedagogicalanalysis. Chinese readers who intend to have a better understanding of English critical essaysshould have some knowledge about GM such as the transfiguration of different experientialprocesses, the techniques of nominalization, and the mechanism of ideational GM andinterpersonal GM. For the most difficult point of GM, nominalization, readers of LCEs canrefer to the technique of the unpacking ‘the favorite clause type’ (relationalization ofexperiential processes), as has been demonstrated in chapter four to get the most congruentmode of expression by upgrading the nominalization, noun phrase group, clause.For those who intend to compose literary critical essay, it is equally important to beequipped with the knowledge and mechanism of ideational and interpersonal GM,appropriate handling of lexical density with different topics to be discussed, and the usages ofpropositions as well as the combination of low and median values of modal verbs. Tocompose a linguistically satisfactory literary critical essay, the writer should be familiar with the transitivity metaphor in which other types of experiential processes tend to be transformedinto relational process to facilitate the reasoning and argumentation. He/she should also giveadequate attention to nominalization by downgrading experiential processes, verbs, adjectivesand learn to connect those nominalization be relational process. At the same time don’t haveto worry too much about the lexical density, for the ratio of nominalization should be over100% per clause and the writer can employ more complex sentence pattern to decrease lexicaldensity. In terms of interpersonal GM, the writer can turn to projected that-clause to reach thegoal of objectivity and employ emphatic sentence pattern to foreground the information theywant to emphasize. For modal verbs, the writer can choose from those with low and medianvalue as much as possible so that the intended readers can be respected and the distanceshortened to facilitate the negotiation and communication at the same time.
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