A Study Of Interpersonal Metaphor In English Comedy Movies

With the development of society and the improvement of science and technology,the theories and methods of metaphor are simultaneously developed. Scholars both athome and abroad have given some deep research from lexical, grammatical and cognitivelevel.Of scholars, Halliday’s investigation of metaphor concentrates on grammatical level.He is the first linguist who has systematically proclaimed grammatical metaphor theory.In his grammatical metaphor theory, grammatical metaphor which is used to expressinterpersonal meaning is called interpersonal grammatical metaphor or interpersonalmetaphor. Because the interpersonal metafunction is mainly realized by the system ofmodality and the system of mood, interpersonal metaphor consists of metaphor ofmodality and metaphor of mood. In the past, the researches about interpersonal metaphorare greatly about the theory itself. Recently, many scholars have applied interpersonalmetaphor theory to discourse analysis, but these researches are mainly focused on thewritten discourse and political, technological discourse. The actors’ line is a special kind of spoken discourse. Based on the former studies,this research makes the actors’ lines of five English comedy movies as the languagecorpus, and intends to demonstrate the application of interpersonal metaphors. And thenthis research intends to find out the functions of interpersonal metaphors from the movielanguage itself, furthermore, combined with Searle’s Indirect Speech Act theory andLeech’s Politeness Principle, this research also intends to analyze the functions ofinterpersonal metaphors from pragmatic approach in this special spoken discourse. Afterresearch this paper finds that interpersonal metaphors are widely used in English comedymovies and they play an important part in the movies. Interpersonal metaphors not onlyenrich the actors’ lines but also have many pragmatic functions. The using ofinterpersonal metaphors can be regarded as an indirect speech act, which imbues the lineswith more illocutionary force. Part of lines can obey the Politeness Principle because ofinterpersonal metaphor, which is of great significance to keep an easy and humorousatmosphere.After these discussions, English comedy movies can be comprehended better by theappreciator and the learner. Meanwhile, this research intends to help English learnersbetter use interpersonal metaphors to express their interpersonal meaning, and realizetheir communicative purposes in a more humorous and easier context.