A Functional Analysis Of Interpersonal GM In Political Debates

The thesis aims to make an analysis of the functions of interpersonal GM in political debates, with an attempt to find out how the debaters exploit interpersonal GM to achieve their communicative functions and make their arguments more convincing. Through the functional analysis of interpersonal metaphors in political debates, the thesis also elaborates the importance of integrating form with function and the necessity of linking semantics and pragmatics.The studies of metaphor can be traced back to the ancient Greece, when Aristotle interprets metaphor as a representative illustration of the classical views and as a device of poetic imagination. However, most of the previous metaphor studies have been focused on the metaphorical expressions at the lexical level, overlooking the metaphors at the grammatical level, though a few researchers have come to realize their existence.M. A. K. Halliday is the first linguist who has formally proclaimed the existence and significance of grammatical metaphor. According to him, grammatical metaphor which expresses interpersonal meaning is interpersonal grammatical metaphor, which includes metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood. The interpersonal metafunction is mainly realized through the system of modality and the system of mood. The orientation of modality can be divided into four types: explicitly subjective, implicitly subjective, explicitly objective and implicitly objective. Halliday points out that the explicitly subjective and explicitly objective forms of modality are, strictly speaking, all metaphorical since all of them represent the modality as being the substantive proposition. In addition, nominalization is an important resource for creating interpersonal grammatical metaphor. By means of nominalization, modality is construed as an unquestionable fact. modality is expressed explicitly with objectivity. Therefore, the source of modality is disguised. The system of mood involves four speech functions: offer, command, statement and question. The incongruent transference in the process of the realization of these functions is metaphor of mood.Former studies on interpersonal grammatical metaphor mainly concentrated on the discussion of its form and classification, few scholars employed interpersonal grammatical metaphor to analyze discourse, although its effect in discourse analysis has begun to arouse attention. Discourse analysis has evolved from descriptive to explanative, from a surface-level analysis to a deeper functional approach. Systemic Functional Grammar provides a multi-level and multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis. The study of interpersonal meaning, as a key component of this framework, plays an important role in discourse analysis.This thesis is a case study of the First Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate in 2004. In light of Halliday's point of view on grammatical metaphor, this thesis first identifies interpersonal GM in the debate and then analyzes their various pragmatic functions. The major findings are summarized as follows: 1. In political debates, explicitly subjective metaphors of modality could help to highlight the firmness of the debater's attitude or belief so as to win the audience's understanding and support; by contrast, explicitly objective metaphors of modality could disguise the subjective nature of the debater's decisions so that he could shirk the responsibility for his wrong doings. And in certain contexts, explicitly subjective metaphors of modality, especially those in the negative form, could convey relevant connotative meanings, such as sarcasm.2. Queclarative, a metaphor of mood formed by replacing declarative mood with the interrogative mood, could implicitly persuade the audience to accept the debater's arguments and induce their participation in the intended dialogue. And a metaphor of mood formed by replacing imperative mood with declarative mood could shorten the social and psychological distance between debater and the audience so as to get the audience's understanding and support; by contrast, another kind of metaphor of mood, with declarative mood replaced by imperative mood, could make the debater's tone more emphatic or more euphemistic, depending on the situation. In addition, the structure let me…could enable a debater's arguments to sound more authoritative.3. In political debates, nominalization of modality can also serve as a means to mask the subjective nature of the debater's arguments or decisions as if they were facts which don't allow any challenges or suspicions.This thesis has the following pedagogical implications:First, the functional analysis of interpersonal GM could enable us to understand the interpersonal meaning of the political debate from a new perspective, which illustrates the subtleties of language use in this kind of genre and helps us have a better understanding of it.Second, this study demonstrates that Systemic Functional Grammar, characterized by its multi-level and multi-function, could provide us with a theoretical framework for genre analysis.Third, through the functional analysis, we find that language form is consistent with its function. Therefore, such a study suggests that similar analysis could also benefit English learners in their improvement of English listening, speaking and writing so that they can develop their communicative competence more effectively.