A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese News Discourse

The significance of the grammatical metaphor theory to systemic-functional linguistics as well as to metaphor studies has been generally acknowledged. Ever since Aristotle, the mystery of metaphor has captured great interest of scholars including the philosophers. Metaphor study has become a multi-disciplinary topic. Since the 1960s, there has been a surge of metaphor mania by linguists and philosophers in the international academic area. Along with the flourishing of metaphor research, grammatical metaphor, as an indispensable part of systemic-functional linguistics, which is seemingly a rather bizarre term. Actually, the grammatical metaphor and lexical metaphor have close connection; they have both similarities and differences. Nowadays grammatical metaphor has gained more and more recognition in the international academic field and has also aroused increasing interest from Chinese linguists. Some scholars have also touched upon the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in the Chinese language based on Halliday's implicit statement of the universality of grammatical metaphor.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 research areas is the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in scientific discourse. This thesis tends to extend the applied study of grammatical metaphor to the news discourse, which is one of the important public discourses and imposes great influence on our lives and society. The approach adopted in this thesis is a contrastive one with an aim at demonstrating the universality of grammatical metaphor and exploring the similarities and differences of their functions in English and Chinese news discourse. By the contrastive analysis of the features of grammatical metaphor, the study reveals the secret hidden from the impartiality and neutrality in the news discourse, therefore, the audiences and the readers can have a better understanding of the nature of the news. The whole thesis is divided into four chapterts. Chapter 1 serves as a literature review; a brief account of the history of metaphor study and a comparison between GM and LM are made. Moreover, offers an illustration of the characteristics of news discourse and previous research work done in this field, explaining the underlying reason why this particular discourse genre is chosen as the study object. It is suggested that in news discourse grammatical metaphors be employed as specific linguistic devices to create and sustain the impression of objectivity and neutrality. Then a review of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, its latest development and the relevant studies by other linguists on the metaphorical nature of grammar are dealt with in Chapter 2. The next chapter, Chapter 3, is devoted to the detailed analyses of the collected data, the similarities and differences in English and Chinese news discourse are discussed in this chapter. Meanwhile, a comparison with grammatical metaphor in scientific discourse is made. Then the last chapter, Chapter 4 is a summary of the findings of our contrastive study of grammatical metaphor's functions in news discourse. Through data analyses, we clarified the six textual functions of grammatical metaphor in news discourse, namely, the referential or naming function, the expanding function, the distilling function, the discursive function, the objectifying function and the optimalizing function, and then the cultural and linguistic reasons which caused the difference are briefly analyzed. Moreover, Chapter 4 also discusses the implications of the grammatical metaphor which not only suggests that communication should be promoted between scholars on Chinese research and linguists on foreign language research, but offers a new understanding of the relationship between language, man and the world.