A Critical Discourse Analysis Of GM In Downton Abbey

Critical Discourse Analysis as a research method aims to uncover the hiddenideology behind the language, the counter-influence of language over ideology and theways in which they interact with the social structure and power relationship. The majormethodological basis of CDA is Halliday’s Systemic-functional Linguistics becausethey all concentrate on the fact that language as a “social semantic” can construe theworld while being constrained by it. Therefore, the present thesis chooses CDA as itsstarting point, Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model as its theoretical framework andHalliday’s Grammatical Metaphor as its analysis tool to analyze the classical TV playDownton Abbey which was presented in2010in Britain, trying to find howGrammatical Metaphor reflects ideology and how the key roles in this play use thelanguage to consolidate their social status.The analysis can finally verify the fact that no language is objective. The adoptionand realization of the Grammatical Metaphors in the discourses are all influenced by theideologies of the language users. Meanwhile, the ideologies are determined by the socialstructure and power relationship; at the same time, the author also wants to find out andexplain the differences of the forms of the Grammatical Metaphors in spoken discoursesand news reports.