A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphors In English And Chinese Journalistic Discourse

The origin of metaphor study can be traced back to the rhetorical studies in the ancient Greece. Since then, countless philosophers, writers, rhetoricians and linguists showed great interest in metaphor, and the tradition of metaphor study has never stopped. Along with the flourishing of metaphor research, grammatical metaphor, first put forward by M. A. K. Halliday and as an indispensable part of systemic-functional grammar, has made a special contribution to the study of metaphor's nature and function. The study of grammatical metaphor has probed into a new dimension of metaphor research, and also interpreted grammatical metaphor as a re-construal of human experience.Nowadays, the significance of the grammatical metaphor theory to systemic-functional linguistics as well as metaphor studies has been generally acknowledged. Many studies have shown that grammatical metaphor theory is not only of theoretical significance, contributing a lot to the philosophy of language, but also applicable in the unpacking of a variety of discourses in different registers. One of the fruitful areas is the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in scientific discourse. Based on Halliday's implicit statement of the universality of grammatical metaphor, this thesis aims at dwelling on the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in journalistic discourse, which is one of the important mass media and imposes great influence on our lives and society, within the theoretical framework of systemic-functional linguistics. This thesis attempts to make a contrastive analysis on the employment of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese journalistic discourse. It tends to demonstrate the universality of grammatical metaphor, exploring the similarities and possible differences of their textual functions in English and Chinese journalistic discourse, and possibility of different journalistic sub-styles influencing the employment of grammatical metaphors.Chapter One serves as a brief introduction to the general framework of the present study, including research background, research purposes and significance, and research design.Chapter Two is devoted to the review of grammatical metaphor theory and journalistic discourse, falling into four parts. The first part is a brief review of the observations of metaphorical nature of grammar. The second part is the revisit to Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory. Based on the distinction between lexical and grammatical metaphor, we give a detailed discussion of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, specifically speaking, its establishment, its classification (ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor) and its latest development. The third part serves as a review of other linguists' studies on grammatical metaphor after Halliday. We trace different ideas of grammatical metaphor proposed by some other systemic-functional linguists and discuss the definition of grammatical metaphor under the framework of a systemic-functional approach. Grammatical metaphor is an incongruent realization of meanings involving transference of grammatical units between different domains. The last part offers an illustration of the characteristics of journalistic discourse and previous research work done in this field, explaining the underlying reason why this particular discourse genre is chosen as our study object. All these works paves the way for conducting an investigation into the grammatical metaphors in journalistic discourse.In Chapter Three, description of statistic results is presented. Through a detailed analyses of our collected data, we find that both English and Chinese journalistic discourses abundantly exploit ideational metaphors, mainly by means of nominalization, with similarities and differences; Chinese journalistic discourse seldom use interpersonal metaphors while English journalistic discourse, especially editorials employ many interpersonal metaphors.Chapter Four serves as a discussion of our major findings in the data analyses from two aspects: linguistic and stylistic. We clarify six textual functions of ideational metaphor in both English and Chinese journalistic discourse, namely, referring function, expanding function, condensing function, discursive function, ideological function and optimalizing function. Meanwhile, their similarities and differences in English and Chinese journalistic discourse are discussed here. Since interpersonal metaphors are most found in English editorials in our present data, we mainly explore their functions in English editorials. Specifically speaking, the functions of metaphors of mood lies in achieving special effects and conveying implication; the functions of metaphors of modality lies in creating objectivity or subjectivity. At last, this chapter also discusses the implications of our grammatical metaphor study, which not only suggests that communication should be promoted between scholars on Chinese research and linguists on foreign language research, but also offers a new understanding of the relationship between language, man and the world.Chapter Five provides a brief summary of the thesis and some tentative conclusions are drawn.