A corpus-based study of interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor in spoken Chinese

As a phenomenon arising from the interaction of semantics and lexico-grammar, Grammatical Metaphor (GM) occurs in the expression of both ideational and interpersonal meanings. Ideational GM is mainly deployed in written texts, while interpersonal GM is frequently observed in spoken discourses. Previous studies on the phenomenon focus their discussion on ideational GM and the use of GM in English. This study is the first attempt to explore the use of interpersonal GM in spoken Chinese. The study develops a framework for the identification and categorization of interpersonal GM in the language. On the basis of the framework, a large corpus of spontaneous conversation is analyzed to reveal how different types of interpersonal GM are distributed. The analysis shows that spoken Chinese has a preference for certain types of metaphorical expression. This study also investigates the relationship between interpersonal GM in spoken Chinese and its immediate context of situation, demonstrating how the deployment of interpersonal GM is affected by the topic of conversation and the social status between speaker and hearer. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.