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.

中文翻译：

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语法隐喻的复杂性：一种基于熵的方法

MAK Halliday 意义上的语法隐喻长期以来一直被研究者从理论和实证研究方面广泛研究。关于实证研究，他们主要使用观察到的或归一化的语法隐喻频率来揭示其在不同文本类型中的分布。然而，很少有研究对语法隐喻的复杂性进行定量检验，因为目前还没有提出衡量语法隐喻复杂程度的指标。本文旨在研究实施熵来衡量这种复杂性的可行性。研究结果表明，熵值可以作为语法隐喻复杂性的指标，以有效揭示不同语域学科利用语法隐喻等语言特征构建知识的方式。这项研究的意义在于它揭示了文本分析中语法隐喻复杂性的定量比较。