Metaphor, Transitivity, and the Literary World - How Dickens and Hardy represent their world through metaphor.

Abstract

Combining the approaches of Systemic Functional Grammar and Corpus Linguistics, the aim of this investigation is to provide a transitivity analysis of metaphor clusters within collected works by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. This research tries to determine, using metaphorical instances of head and thought, what types of processes are used for metaphor, and what constituent these nouns form within the processes. The results will determine what transitivity and a literary analysis can add to a lexico-grammatical approach to metaphor and subsequently what this means for language learners and how they acquire knowledge of metaphors.