Abstract
Grammatical metaphor in M. A. K. Halliday’s sense has long been extensively investigated by researchers in terms of theoretical and empirical studies. Regarding the empirical studies, they have predominantly employed observed or normalized frequencies of grammatical metaphor to uncover its distribution in different text types. Few studies, however, were conducted to quantitatively examine the complexity of grammatical metaphor in that no indicator presently is proposed to measure the degree of complexity in grammatical metaphor. This paper targeted at investigating the feasibility of implementing entropy to measure this complexity. The findings demonstrate that the entropy value could be afforded as an indicator of complexity of grammatical metaphor to efficiently uncover the way that disciplines of different registers build knowledge by means of employing such linguistic features as grammatical metaphor. This research is significant in that it sheds light on the quantitative comparison of complexity of grammatical metaphor in text analysis.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by Beijing Municipal Social Sciences Foundation [Project No. 20YYB007], 1 July 2020–1 July 2023.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her constructive comments, and Associate Professor Yanmei Gao from Peking University and Professor Yanhua Xia from China West Normal University for their inspiring suggestions.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Sémiotique des textscapes : quelle contribution du textscape linguistique à la mise en scène des langues dans un corpus de sites web ?
- A Peircean framework for analyzing subjectivity in film: a nine-field ocularization matrix
- Assessing the subtitling of emotive reactions: a social semiotic approach
- A semiotic model of South Korea’s cultural industry ecosystem: the K-pop industry
- The development of possible worlds in an online video game
- Deployment of gestures in the semiotic construction of scientific knowledge: a systemic functional approach to pedagogic semiosis
- Complexity of grammatical metaphor: an entropy-based approach
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Sémiotique des textscapes : quelle contribution du textscape linguistique à la mise en scène des langues dans un corpus de sites web ?
- A Peircean framework for analyzing subjectivity in film: a nine-field ocularization matrix
- Assessing the subtitling of emotive reactions: a social semiotic approach
- A semiotic model of South Korea’s cultural industry ecosystem: the K-pop industry
- The development of possible worlds in an online video game
- Deployment of gestures in the semiotic construction of scientific knowledge: a systemic functional approach to pedagogic semiosis
- Complexity of grammatical metaphor: an entropy-based approach