摘  要

韩礼德作为系统功能学派的一名重要成员，他始终认为隐喻不单单只存在于词汇层面，还时常发生在语法层面。这就是后来人们所提到的语法隐喻。在韩礼德首次提出语法隐喻这一概念后，又将语法隐喻分为概念隐喻和人际隐喻。本文将着重对商务合同中的概念隐喻现象进行深入探讨及解析。本文旨在发现概念隐喻在商务英语合同文本中的主要形式及其它所产生的作用。通过选取大量的商务合同作为语料并对其进行分析，有如下三点发现：第一，商务英语合同中随处可见语法隐喻用法，特别是概念隐喻。第二，在商务合同中语法隐喻的最常见的类型为名词化。第三，概念隐喻加强了商务合同的正式性，客观性，精确性。对语法隐喻的了解与研究，对今后从事外贸活动的人们有着十分重要的作用。今后，笔者将对商务合同中的人际隐喻进行进一步的探讨和分析。

关键词：语法隐喻；商务合同；名词化

Abstract

Halliday is one of the famous scholars in Systemic Functional School. He thinks metaphor is not limited in the lexical aspect. Moreover, a special use of metaphor appears in a grammatical level. Many scholars call it grammatical metaphor. Halliday is the first one who put forward the concept of grammatical metaphor. In addition, grammatical metaphor has two categories. First is conceptual metaphor. And second is interpersonal metaphor. In this paper, the author will mainly describe the conceptual metaphor. It tries to find out the main form of conceptual metaphor and the functions of the conceptual metaphor in business English contracts. The author will choose a lot of business English contracts as a corpus, and analyze most of them. Naturally, the author got several findings in the process of studying. First of all, it is common to use abundant grammatical metaphors in business English contracts. Secondly, nominalization is the major form in business English contracts. Finally, the function of conceptual metaphor is to guarantee the formality. It also emphasizes the objectivity and lays stress on the accuracy. Businessmen may acquire some useful information from this study. They will know more about the features of business English contracts. At the same time, it can avoid the economic disputes in business activities as much as possible. In the future, the author will research and analyze the interpersonal metaphor in business English contracts.

Key words: Grammatical metaphor; business English contracts; nominalization