| In functional grammar, the research of grammatical metaphor (GM) always receives great attention both at home and abroad. Halliday (2004), the representative of GM researchers, proposes two categories of GM, namely, ideational and interpersonal metaphor. On his basis, an Australian linguist, Martin (1993) puts forward the idea that there should be textual metaphor (TM) in the family of GM. He classifies TM into five types, internal conjunction, text reference, meta-language relation, metaphorical themes and news. However, many other linguists hold far more conservative ideas as far as the existence of TM is concerned. Few of them have tried to set up a systematic and scientific framework on TM. They either touch upon one subcategory of it or devote themselves to discussing only a specific phenomenon of TM. Therefore, the linguistic theory of GM is quite new and thus needs supplementing and improving. This thesis classifies GM into three subcategories, namely, textual metaphor, ideational metaphor, and interpersonal metaphor. The focus of this thesis falls on textual metaphor. In the present study, metaphorical theme does not only include the two special cases of marked theme—predicated theme and thematic equative, which have been admitted as TM by both Martin and Thompson; but also the general marked theme. The reason for adding it into the metaphorical theme lies in that the general marked theme changes theme-rheme structure of a clause. As far as information structure is concerned, generally, in English, new information is located in the end of the clause and old information is put at the beginning as the starting point. However, sometimes new information is placed at the beginning to achieve certain textual or semantic effect; such a case is metaphorical information structure. In addition to the above two types of TM, another type of TM—metaphorical cohesive devices, is often applied to make the organization of a discourse more cohesive and coherent. It refers to all the devices that are used to realize the conjunctive relationship except the conjunctives such as and, therefore and so on. The author totally indentifies four types—meta-language relation, text reference, non-finite verbal phrase and nominalization. Martin has implicitly or explicitly made close explanation on why meta-language relation, text reference, non-finite verbal phrase are treated as TM. In this thesis, the author claims nominalization as a metaphorical cohesive device. The reason is that nominalization improves the cohesion of a discourse principally through the theme-rheme progression and the anaphoric reference. It is a device to realize metaphorical themes and metaphorical news. In terms of the data collected for grammatical metaphor study, scholars prefer scientific discourses to other types such as news discourse which is traditionally considered to be of the least possibility of the existence of GM, let alone TM. In order to prove the justification of the reconstructed framework about TM, the author is to make a tentative analysis on English news discourse. It is proved that TM does exist in English news discourse and is of significance in the construction of news discourse. Therefore, this thesis provides a new angle for the research of news discourse. This thesis is of significance in two points:(1) Theoretically, this thesis expands Martin's theory on textual metaphor in the following aspects:reclassify textual metaphor into 3 subcategories, namely metaphorical theme, metaphorical information structure, and metaphorical cohesive devices; and make supplement to textual metaphor by adding general theme, nominalization and non-finite verbal group into the family of textual metaphor. (2) Empirically, the thesis makes a tentative analysis of news discourse under the modified framework of textual metaphor, which is seldom touched upon by previous studies. |
