Study Of English Newspaper Editorial From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, and the study of metaphor can be traced back to rhetorical studies in ancient Greece to Aristotle's credit. Ever since then, numerous linguists, rhetoricians, and philosophers have showed great interests in metaphor in their studies. Under their efforts, the study of metaphor has evolved into a cross-field discipline. The traditional views mainly investigated metaphor from the lexical and rhetorical perspectives. However, the past decades saw a radical change in metaphorical study. In the study of grammatical metaphor, the most influential figure is M.A.K.Halliday, whose treatment of grammatical metaphor is regarded as the beginning of conscious study of GM. He classified grammatical metaphor into two categories: ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors. Nominalization, included into the ideational grammatical metaphor, is considered as the most powerful means in the realization of ideational grammatical metaphor by Halliday. The interpersonal grammatical metaphor was further divided into metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood. Then, as the deepening of his study on GM, Halliday put forth a new classification of GM into thirteen types, which is a little more complicated compared with the previous two-category classification.For the easy identification of grammatical metaphors, the author reclassifies the thirteen types of GM recognized by Halliday into four general categories, namely Nominalization, Adjectivation, Verbalization and Prepositionalization. This modified classification of GM based on Halliday's theory of grammatical metaphor is adopted as the theoretical framework of the present study for the analysis of the genre of English newspaper editorial with the aim to throw some light on the features unique to the genre of English newspaper editorial, thus acting as a guide for the comprehension and writing of this kind of discourse.