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【Abstract】Appraisal theory, is a latest development or even breakthrough of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).It mainly concerns with the various ways in same time, establish a personal relationship or strengthen ties with interlocutors. Therefore, we can see that the study on evaluation is of great significance. In this paper, it discusses briefly the valuation of the text: While the Auto Waits in terms of Grammatical Metaphor, with the aim of analyzing the formation of the characteristics of the protagonists.
【Key words】Grammatical Metaphor; Character Analysis; Protagonists
【中图分类号】I106 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】1001-4128(2010)12-0056-05
从语法隐喻角度分析《汽车等待的时候》中主人公性格
1 A brief introduction of While the Auto waits
O. Henry has deep insights into human destiny and human nature. Among the story of New Yorkers, the theme of pretense strikes the dominant chords of these stories——the pervasive desire to pose for what one if not, if only for a brief spell of time and regardless of the acknowledged risk involved. [1](P66)In the story “While the Auto Waits”, which is recognized as one of his best story of the theme of false pretense. A comely young woman pretends to be a noble lady and tries to impress a young man who stops to chat with her in a park. The man masks his real identity by pretending to be a humble restaurant cashier, which the ending shows to be the position she holds. Meanwhile he is also the wealthy owner of the chauffeured sedan, which she has pointed to as her own. Such a person is worthy of sympathy, O. Henry never looks down upon them. Although the ending of the story is ironical, he never despises them. Hence, this paper put the stress on the characters of the hero and the heroine through the following three aspects in the next chapter.
2 The significance of Evaluation
In the previous chapter, a brief introduction about the writer and this manuscript has been made. In this chapter, I will make a concise review of the literature on Attitudinal System; Material Process; grammatical metaphor abroad and in China. Then, I’ll conduct a shallow discussion of their application to the text respectively, with the aim to analyze the formation of the characters.
One of the main purposes of communicating is to interact with other people: to establish and maintain appropriate social links with them. Based on this fact, Halliday proposed the interpersonal meta-function of language together with another two, namely, the ideational meta-function and textual meta-function. And evaluation is a very important part in the realization of interpersonal meaning. [2](P87)According to Thompson,[3](P29)“evaluation is a central part of the meaning of any text and that any analysis of the interpersonal meanings of a text must take it into account.” Therefore, we can see that the study on evaluation is of great significance.
3 Overview of Grammatical Metaphor
Descending from Aristotle and Plato, temporary theories of metaphor fall into constructivism and non-constructivism (Ortony, 1979)[4](P56). And as is known to us all that the concept of grammatical metaphor was invented and first put forward by Halliday. Being the founder of systemic-functional linguistics, he points out in the last chapter of An Introduction to Functional Grammar that metaphor does not only happen at the lexical level but also exists at the grammatical level, and hence he developed a new terminology of metaphor: Grammatical Metaphor. It was in the same book that Halliday made a relatively and systemically description of grammatical metaphor for the first time. Meanwhile, he made it clear that he prefers to use the term of congruent to compare with metaphorical rather than the common couple: literal and metaphorical. Contrasting with the view point of non-constructivism, he claims that metaphor is only a way of expression which is closer to the real life and that it is one of the meaningful choices the language user makes. Seen from this point of view, all the language that adults are using must be full of metaphor and utterance or discourse completely without any metaphor can only be found in children’s language. [5](P189) In the second edition of An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994/2000) A Systemic Functional Linguistic Approach to O’ Henry’s short Stories give a provisional definition of grammatical metaphor as: the expression of a meaning through a lexico-grammatical form which originally evolved to express a different kind of meaning. According to that, there is no essential difference between lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor, and it is further said that lexical metaphor can be seen as a sub-category of grammatical metaphor.[6](P148) In the next chapter of this paper, the features of grammatical metaphor in one of O. Henry’s short stories will be analyzed and discussed.
4 A Functional Linguistic Analysis Of While the Auto Waits
Before introducing Halliday’s Grammatical Metaphor, Thompson (2000:163) points out that metaphor is one of the most common resources of problems that are run up against in deciding how to code certain wordings.[7](P163) We of course know that metaphor is a familiar concept and it is generally considered not difficult to recognize when used in the traditional form, for example, “crippled” and “burden” are clearly being used metaphorically in the following sentence:
(a)The north is crippled with the burden of the industrial revolution
Here, “crippled” is said to have a literal meaning of “lame” and a metaphorical meaning of “in a difficult situation”, and it is the same with another word in this example sentence “burden”, which metaphorically here means “effect of something” but literally means “something heavy”. Therefore the example above might be “translated” as follows:
(a1)The north is in a difficult situation because of the effects of the industrial revolution
That is a typical traditional analysis of metaphor, which is seen as relating to the way a certain word is used, and the term “metaphorical” is used as the opposite of literal to describe the meaning of the word. This metaphor is recognized as lexical metaphor and it is obvious that in this case the status of a word or an expression stays the same but its meaning changed. But systemic functional linguists tell us that metaphor is something happening on the level of lexico-grammar and therefore it is called Grammatical Metaphor, in which case, what is changed is not the meaning but the grammar status of the word or the expression.
5 Identification of Grammatical Metaphor
As for the identification of grammatical metaphor, a pair of concepts is very important: one is the congruent form and the other is the metaphorical form. The standard for deciding grammatical metaphor is to test whether the semantic meaning of a wording has congruence with its grammar status. Thompson (2000: 164) explains that the term congruent can be informally glossed as “closer to the state of affairs in the external world”, for example, nouns congruently encode thing, and verbs congruently encode happenings.[8](P164) As for the recognition of congruent forms, in Halliday’s (1994: 343) words, it is said that though metaphoric variation might have been- inherent in the nature of language from the very beginning, we are able to recognize the congruent forms for what they are, as the typical way in which experience is construed, or in other words, the congruent forms are “typical ways of saying things”.[9](P154) Consequently, we can regard some wordings as metaphorical when they are not organized in “typical ways of saying things”.
For Halliday classifies grammatical metaphor into two categories: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor, it is easy to understand that this way of classification has a great deal to do with his “meta-functions”: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. As a result, it is still not surprising to find metaphor of transitivity in Halliday’s ideational metaphor. In this case, a process of one kind is metaphorically shifted to and expressed by another kind of process. And with the exchange of processes, the elements of clause (such as participant, process, circumstantial element and so on) will replace each other metaphorically. So, for example, instead of saying “they arrived at the summit on the fifth day”, we may choose a wording such as “the fifth day saw them at the summit”. Obviously, on this occasion, the time (circumstance) “the fifth day” has been taken as if it were a participant, who was an onlooker “seeing” the climbers when they arrived at the summit.
(a)The original material process arrived has been represented as a mental process saw;
(b)The participant they have been turned into phenomenon them;
(c)The circumstance of time the fifth day (though not a conscious being) has been treated as if it were a participant.
The course of metaphor of transitivity in this example can be analyzed as follows:[10]P73
In this part, I will employ certain materials from While the Auto Waits, so as to explore their characteristics in grammatical metaphor. The whole body of this writing can be found in the Appendix at the end of this paper.
Martin[11](1992:120) tell us that ideational metaphor comes about in the course of choosing processes as follows: firstly, one of the six processes, that is Material Process, Mental Process, Relational Process, Verbal Process, Behavioral Process and Existential Process, is chosen; secondly, functional elements related to that chosen process will be then chosen; thirdly, choices of the word class that can realize those chosen functions will be made. Each of these choices is certain to draw differences between the congruent form and incongruent form, and the various forms of realization of meanings are just ideational grammatical metaphors we are talking about here: [10](P77)
(1) Material Process→ Existential Process
In this case, a Material Process is dressed up as if it were an Existential Process, as analyzed on Example below:
(a)Promptly at the beginning of twilight, came again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park the girl in gray.
(b)And there was one who knew it.
If it is reworded more congruently, the meaning of the above instance might be expressed:
(a1)Promptly at the beginning of twilight, the girl in gray came again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park.
(b1)And one knew it.
(2) Existential Process→ Material Process
(a)It will soon give way to some other whim.
(b)Just now I am besieged by two.
(c)But the whim may not seize me again.
(d)The autos generally bear the monogram of their owner.
(e)The girl in gray mounted in her place.
If it is reworded more congruently, the meaning of the above instance might be expressed:
(a1) soon there will be some other whim.
(b1) there were two guys courting to me.
(c1) But there wouldn’t such a whim in my mind.
(d1) there was the monogram of their owner on the autos.
(e1) the girl was soon in her place.
(3) Mental Process→ Material Process
In this case, a Mental Process is represented by a Material Process, such as:
(a)…a face that shone through it with a calm and unconscious beauty.
Congruently reworded, the message could be organized as follows:
(a1)…through it we can see a face with a calm and unconscious beauty.
Its congruent and metaphorical wording can be compared as illustrated in the following form:
Other instances as follows:
(b)…can I be near the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity
(c)Sometimes the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass nearly drives me mad
(d)I had formed the opinion that …
(e)The girl consulted a tiny watch…
Some examples above can be replaced in a more congruent way of wording as follows:
(b1) …can I feel the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity.
(c1)sometimes I became nearly insane towards the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass.
(d1) I once thought that…
(e1) the girl glanced at a tiny watch…
6 Summary
Based on the discussion above, it can be concluded that the writer prefer choosing a sequence of items connected tightly with the subjects to start his story-telling, especially with its characteristics and its main protagonists. At the same time, in order to make the text efficient and concise, the writer tends to choose simple themes at the beginning of his stories but avoid multiple ones as much as possible.
In a short story, the writer mainly describes human activities and various situations in nature, so that most frequently he will employ the grammatical metaphorical wording related to experiential process, the heading three of which are Material Process, Mental Process, Relational Process. Simultaneously, it also seems because of the obvious difference from other genres that interpersonal grammatical metaphor does not work so much in short stories. And Material Process, Mental Process and Relational Process are the dominant three processes among the six processes. It seems just because of this reason that the majority of metaphors of transitivity are found to exist among these main three processes. Furthermore, in this story of O. Henry, the metaphors of transitivity still do not come about in the same scale. Just as analyzed above, the largest number of types of metaphors of transitivity proves to be that of those Material Processes which are metaphorically used to take the place of Mental Processes. This way of metaphorical wording usually makes the writing more vigorous, realistic, of more vitality and hence makes the language possess more literature characteristics.
Bibliography
[1] 朱文，朱碧恒. 欧·亨利作品赏析 [M]. 北京： 中国和平出版社 1996. P66
[2] Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. P87[3] Geoff Thompson. Introducing Functional Grammar[M]. Edward Arnold Ltd, 2000.P29
[4] Ortony, A. (ed.) Metaphor and Thought [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.P56
[5] 同[2]:P189
[6] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1994/2000.P148
[7] 同[3]:P163
[8] 同[3]:P164
[9] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1994. P343
[10] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. London: Arnold, 1985.P73
[11] Martin, J, R. English Text: System and Structure. [MI Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1992. P120
【Key words】Grammatical Metaphor; Character Analysis; Protagonists
【中图分类号】I106 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】1001-4128(2010)12-0056-05
从语法隐喻角度分析《汽车等待的时候》中主人公性格
1 A brief introduction of While the Auto waits
O. Henry has deep insights into human destiny and human nature. Among the story of New Yorkers, the theme of pretense strikes the dominant chords of these stories——the pervasive desire to pose for what one if not, if only for a brief spell of time and regardless of the acknowledged risk involved. [1](P66)In the story “While the Auto Waits”, which is recognized as one of his best story of the theme of false pretense. A comely young woman pretends to be a noble lady and tries to impress a young man who stops to chat with her in a park. The man masks his real identity by pretending to be a humble restaurant cashier, which the ending shows to be the position she holds. Meanwhile he is also the wealthy owner of the chauffeured sedan, which she has pointed to as her own. Such a person is worthy of sympathy, O. Henry never looks down upon them. Although the ending of the story is ironical, he never despises them. Hence, this paper put the stress on the characters of the hero and the heroine through the following three aspects in the next chapter.
2 The significance of Evaluation
In the previous chapter, a brief introduction about the writer and this manuscript has been made. In this chapter, I will make a concise review of the literature on Attitudinal System; Material Process; grammatical metaphor abroad and in China. Then, I’ll conduct a shallow discussion of their application to the text respectively, with the aim to analyze the formation of the characters.
One of the main purposes of communicating is to interact with other people: to establish and maintain appropriate social links with them. Based on this fact, Halliday proposed the interpersonal meta-function of language together with another two, namely, the ideational meta-function and textual meta-function. And evaluation is a very important part in the realization of interpersonal meaning. [2](P87)According to Thompson,[3](P29)“evaluation is a central part of the meaning of any text and that any analysis of the interpersonal meanings of a text must take it into account.” Therefore, we can see that the study on evaluation is of great significance.
3 Overview of Grammatical Metaphor
Descending from Aristotle and Plato, temporary theories of metaphor fall into constructivism and non-constructivism (Ortony, 1979)[4](P56). And as is known to us all that the concept of grammatical metaphor was invented and first put forward by Halliday. Being the founder of systemic-functional linguistics, he points out in the last chapter of An Introduction to Functional Grammar that metaphor does not only happen at the lexical level but also exists at the grammatical level, and hence he developed a new terminology of metaphor: Grammatical Metaphor. It was in the same book that Halliday made a relatively and systemically description of grammatical metaphor for the first time. Meanwhile, he made it clear that he prefers to use the term of congruent to compare with metaphorical rather than the common couple: literal and metaphorical. Contrasting with the view point of non-constructivism, he claims that metaphor is only a way of expression which is closer to the real life and that it is one of the meaningful choices the language user makes. Seen from this point of view, all the language that adults are using must be full of metaphor and utterance or discourse completely without any metaphor can only be found in children’s language. [5](P189) In the second edition of An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994/2000) A Systemic Functional Linguistic Approach to O’ Henry’s short Stories give a provisional definition of grammatical metaphor as: the expression of a meaning through a lexico-grammatical form which originally evolved to express a different kind of meaning. According to that, there is no essential difference between lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor, and it is further said that lexical metaphor can be seen as a sub-category of grammatical metaphor.[6](P148) In the next chapter of this paper, the features of grammatical metaphor in one of O. Henry’s short stories will be analyzed and discussed.
4 A Functional Linguistic Analysis Of While the Auto Waits
Before introducing Halliday’s Grammatical Metaphor, Thompson (2000:163) points out that metaphor is one of the most common resources of problems that are run up against in deciding how to code certain wordings.[7](P163) We of course know that metaphor is a familiar concept and it is generally considered not difficult to recognize when used in the traditional form, for example, “crippled” and “burden” are clearly being used metaphorically in the following sentence:
(a)The north is crippled with the burden of the industrial revolution
Here, “crippled” is said to have a literal meaning of “lame” and a metaphorical meaning of “in a difficult situation”, and it is the same with another word in this example sentence “burden”, which metaphorically here means “effect of something” but literally means “something heavy”. Therefore the example above might be “translated” as follows:
(a1)The north is in a difficult situation because of the effects of the industrial revolution
That is a typical traditional analysis of metaphor, which is seen as relating to the way a certain word is used, and the term “metaphorical” is used as the opposite of literal to describe the meaning of the word. This metaphor is recognized as lexical metaphor and it is obvious that in this case the status of a word or an expression stays the same but its meaning changed. But systemic functional linguists tell us that metaphor is something happening on the level of lexico-grammar and therefore it is called Grammatical Metaphor, in which case, what is changed is not the meaning but the grammar status of the word or the expression.
5 Identification of Grammatical Metaphor
As for the identification of grammatical metaphor, a pair of concepts is very important: one is the congruent form and the other is the metaphorical form. The standard for deciding grammatical metaphor is to test whether the semantic meaning of a wording has congruence with its grammar status. Thompson (2000: 164) explains that the term congruent can be informally glossed as “closer to the state of affairs in the external world”, for example, nouns congruently encode thing, and verbs congruently encode happenings.[8](P164) As for the recognition of congruent forms, in Halliday’s (1994: 343) words, it is said that though metaphoric variation might have been- inherent in the nature of language from the very beginning, we are able to recognize the congruent forms for what they are, as the typical way in which experience is construed, or in other words, the congruent forms are “typical ways of saying things”.[9](P154) Consequently, we can regard some wordings as metaphorical when they are not organized in “typical ways of saying things”.
For Halliday classifies grammatical metaphor into two categories: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor, it is easy to understand that this way of classification has a great deal to do with his “meta-functions”: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. As a result, it is still not surprising to find metaphor of transitivity in Halliday’s ideational metaphor. In this case, a process of one kind is metaphorically shifted to and expressed by another kind of process. And with the exchange of processes, the elements of clause (such as participant, process, circumstantial element and so on) will replace each other metaphorically. So, for example, instead of saying “they arrived at the summit on the fifth day”, we may choose a wording such as “the fifth day saw them at the summit”. Obviously, on this occasion, the time (circumstance) “the fifth day” has been taken as if it were a participant, who was an onlooker “seeing” the climbers when they arrived at the summit.
(a)The original material process arrived has been represented as a mental process saw;
(b)The participant they have been turned into phenomenon them;
(c)The circumstance of time the fifth day (though not a conscious being) has been treated as if it were a participant.
The course of metaphor of transitivity in this example can be analyzed as follows:[10]P73
In this part, I will employ certain materials from While the Auto Waits, so as to explore their characteristics in grammatical metaphor. The whole body of this writing can be found in the Appendix at the end of this paper.
Martin[11](1992:120) tell us that ideational metaphor comes about in the course of choosing processes as follows: firstly, one of the six processes, that is Material Process, Mental Process, Relational Process, Verbal Process, Behavioral Process and Existential Process, is chosen; secondly, functional elements related to that chosen process will be then chosen; thirdly, choices of the word class that can realize those chosen functions will be made. Each of these choices is certain to draw differences between the congruent form and incongruent form, and the various forms of realization of meanings are just ideational grammatical metaphors we are talking about here: [10](P77)
(1) Material Process→ Existential Process
In this case, a Material Process is dressed up as if it were an Existential Process, as analyzed on Example below:
(a)Promptly at the beginning of twilight, came again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park the girl in gray.
(b)And there was one who knew it.
If it is reworded more congruently, the meaning of the above instance might be expressed:
(a1)Promptly at the beginning of twilight, the girl in gray came again to that quiet corner of that quiet, small park.
(b1)And one knew it.
(2) Existential Process→ Material Process
(a)It will soon give way to some other whim.
(b)Just now I am besieged by two.
(c)But the whim may not seize me again.
(d)The autos generally bear the monogram of their owner.
(e)The girl in gray mounted in her place.
If it is reworded more congruently, the meaning of the above instance might be expressed:
(a1) soon there will be some other whim.
(b1) there were two guys courting to me.
(c1) But there wouldn’t such a whim in my mind.
(d1) there was the monogram of their owner on the autos.
(e1) the girl was soon in her place.
(3) Mental Process→ Material Process
In this case, a Mental Process is represented by a Material Process, such as:
(a)…a face that shone through it with a calm and unconscious beauty.
Congruently reworded, the message could be organized as follows:
(a1)…through it we can see a face with a calm and unconscious beauty.
Its congruent and metaphorical wording can be compared as illustrated in the following form:
Other instances as follows:
(b)…can I be near the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity
(c)Sometimes the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass nearly drives me mad
(d)I had formed the opinion that …
(e)The girl consulted a tiny watch…
Some examples above can be replaced in a more congruent way of wording as follows:
(b1) …can I feel the great, common, throbbing heart of humanity.
(c1)sometimes I became nearly insane towards the very tinkle of the ice in my champagne glass.
(d1) I once thought that…
(e1) the girl glanced at a tiny watch…
6 Summary
Based on the discussion above, it can be concluded that the writer prefer choosing a sequence of items connected tightly with the subjects to start his story-telling, especially with its characteristics and its main protagonists. At the same time, in order to make the text efficient and concise, the writer tends to choose simple themes at the beginning of his stories but avoid multiple ones as much as possible.
In a short story, the writer mainly describes human activities and various situations in nature, so that most frequently he will employ the grammatical metaphorical wording related to experiential process, the heading three of which are Material Process, Mental Process, Relational Process. Simultaneously, it also seems because of the obvious difference from other genres that interpersonal grammatical metaphor does not work so much in short stories. And Material Process, Mental Process and Relational Process are the dominant three processes among the six processes. It seems just because of this reason that the majority of metaphors of transitivity are found to exist among these main three processes. Furthermore, in this story of O. Henry, the metaphors of transitivity still do not come about in the same scale. Just as analyzed above, the largest number of types of metaphors of transitivity proves to be that of those Material Processes which are metaphorically used to take the place of Mental Processes. This way of metaphorical wording usually makes the writing more vigorous, realistic, of more vitality and hence makes the language possess more literature characteristics.
Bibliography
[1] 朱文，朱碧恒. 欧·亨利作品赏析 [M]. 北京： 中国和平出版社 1996. P66
[2] Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. P87[3] Geoff Thompson. Introducing Functional Grammar[M]. Edward Arnold Ltd, 2000.P29
[4] Ortony, A. (ed.) Metaphor and Thought [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.P56
[5] 同[2]:P189
[6] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1994/2000.P148
[7] 同[3]:P163
[8] 同[3]:P164
[9] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1994. P343
[10] Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [M]. London: Arnold, 1985.P73
[11] Martin, J, R. English Text: System and Structure. [MI Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1992. P120