Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And English Economic News Report: A Contrastive Analysis

Aristotle was the scholar who made the earliest relatively systematic research on metaphor. Since then, many researchers from different academic fields studied it from different perspectives and then established some metaphor theories. Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, with further development, has become an important tool to elucidate the essence of metaphor. It is not only of theoretical significance but also applicable in unpacking some types of discourses in various registers. The research on grammatical metaphors in scientific discourse has seen its grand achievement.This dissertation makes a statistical analysis of grammatical metaphors (GMs) in the selected twenty-four English and Chinese economic news reports (ENRs), aiming to testify the universality of grammatical metaphor in languages. Adopting the contrastive analysis method as well as the quantitative and qualitative methods, the author investigates the similarities and differences of grammatical metaphors between English and Chinese ENRs as well as some reasons for them, and then further discusses the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor in terms of language functions. Since this dissertation intends to discuss the grammatical metaphors in ENRs, it only focuses on the grammatical metaphors closely related to the ENRs, rather than all its subtypes.This dissertation comprises five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, which involves the reasons for making this study, the organization of the dissertation. chapter two is literature review, first presenting the history of the study on metaphor, then elaborating Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, which acts as the theoretical framework. It distinguishes the notion of"congruent form"and"incongruent form", explains the nature of grammatical metaphor, then elaborates the development of the theory and the ideational metaphors as well as the interpersonal metaphors, and finally gives a brief introduction on"nominalization". Chapter three introduces research methodology, it nails down the method of collecting the reports, lists the questions this study intends to answer, and introduces the research methods and procedures, finally it focuses on the way of identifying each type of ideational and interpersonal metaphors. Chapter four makes a statistical analysis of grammatical metaphors in the selected English and Chinese ENRs, explores the similarities and differences of grammatical metaphors between English and Chinese ENRs as well as some reasons for them. Then, based upon the data analysis, the last part of this chapter further discusses and summarizes grammatical metaphor functions in both English and Chinese economic news reports. This can be seen as the deep reason for the universal and abundant existence of grammatical metaphors in ENRs. Chapter five is conclusion, consisting of the practical value and the limitations of the study.