语法隐喻

Grammatical metaphor

隐喻是生活中常见的一种比喻,一种生动的源自生活的表达方式。在英语专著中对隐喻的较新的定义为:“将一个词从其本义转为一般不能换用但却相似的另一个词,强调其认同,即两者相似,但不是明喻”(Larham,1991:100)。那么,什么是语法隐喻呢?目前尚无一个公认的清晰的定义。我个人认为在构成隐喻的两个概念领域中,其中至少一个领域应与语法形式有关。本文就是从这个最基本的认识出发,介绍几种主要的语法隐喻形式。

Grammatical metaphor has a long history, which dated back as early as the classical Greek and Roman period in Europe and the Spring and Autumn Period in China in the sense that the naming of grammatical terminology was inspired by the metaphorisation of the real world. It was widely practised in the medieval period by metaphorizing grammatical categories to mean phenomena in various domains in the real world. After a silence of a thousand years or so. today one witnesses rejuvenation of grammatical metaphorisation through the efforts of systemic-functional linguists as well as American functionalists in their theoretical endeavour.