A Brief Analysis of Grammatical Metaphor

The concept of grammatical metaphor was originally put forward by Halliday,the founder of the systemic-functional linguistics.In the last chapter of his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar,he pointed out that metaphorical variation is lexicogrammatical rather than simply lexical and once we have recognized this we find that there is also such a thing as grammatical metaphor.Grammatical metaphor is a universal phenomenon in all human languages.This paper mainly focuses on the following aspects: firstly,it discusses the theoretical basis for the existence of grammatical metaphor from three aspects;secondly,it analyzes the classification of grammatical metaphor,i.e.conceptual metaphor and interpersonal metaphor which consists of metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality;thirdly,the relations between grammatical metaphor and lexical metaphor will be presented briefly;finally,it talks about the significance of grammatical metaphor.