Study on Subject Knowledge Building Based on Discipline Discourse Corpus: From the Perspective of Grammatical Metaphor

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the distribution characteristics of different grammatical metaphor types in different types of knowledge. Six textbooks of geophysics, writing, geography, management, biochemistry, and history were selected as samples to build their own electronic textbook corpus, and by means of word suffix search and related word form search, it was found that: (1) there are certain distribution characteristics of grammatical metaphor usage types in subject textbooks of different knowledge types. Experiential grammatical metaphors are all used most frequently; interpersonal grammatical metaphors are used more than logical grammatical metaphors in the process of constructing technical knowledge; logical grammatical metaphors are used more than interpersonal grammatical metaphors in the process of constructing educational or daily knowledge. (2) The hierarchical nature of the representation, presentation, and organization of knowledge differs among knowledge types and it is inferred that technical knowledge is highest hierarchy knowledge type. This study also has some implications for the development and evaluation of teaching materials.