A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In Opinion Columns Of English And Chinese Newspaper

Aristotle was regarded as the earliest scholar of the metaphor study. Since then, there are also many scholarsfrom different fields have studied metaphor and established some metaphor theories. They generally studiedmetaphor from lexical perspective, such as Richards (1936), Lakoff,(1993) etc. However, Halliday believes thatthere is another type of metaphor in the form of lexicogrammar and named it as “grammatical metaphor”(GM),an important part of his systemic functional linguistics theory. After grammatical metaphor develops further, ithas already been a powerful tool to explore the nature of metaphor.Based on Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory, the thesis tries to testify the universality of grammaticalmetaphor in opinion columns of English and Chinese newspaper by collecting data and making a statisticanalysis again. Meanwhile, data-based analysis of the contrastive study is used to find out the similarities anddifferences of realization of GM in English and Chinese data and explore their reasons as well. Therefore, thethesis proposes the following research questions:1. What types of grammatical metaphors are employed inOpinion Columns of English Newspaper (OCEN) and Opinion Columns of Chinese Newspaper (OCCN)? Howare GM distributed respectively?2. What are the major realizations of GM in OCEN and OCCN?3. Are thereany similarities and differences on GM realizations between OCEN and OCCN? If so, what are the reasons? Inorder to ensure the comparability of opinion columns of English and Chinese newspaper, the research choosesfive articles on the topic of well being issues both from English and Chinese newspaper, which are accessiblefrom http://global.nytimes.com. and http://www.gmw.cn/respectively. By employing the method of thecombination of quantitative and qualitative approach, the author analyses ideational metaphor and interpersonalmetaphor existed in the data.The research shows that a large amount of grammatical metaphor exists in opinion columns of English andChinese newspaper and ideational metaphor is the major realization. The similarities are nominalization andadjectivization in high frequency and declarative realized by interrogative of metaphor of mood. The majordifferences are as follows: the English grammatical metaphors is rich in inflections while Chinese seldom is not;passive voice is often used in English while it is seldom used in Chinese; As for interpersonal metaphor,modality of mood in Chinese is adopted more than that in English. In addition, the main reasons accounting forthe similarities and differences are provided from language and culture perspectives.The thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to research background, rationale and significance of the present study as well as the organization of this paper. Chapter two is literature review, whichintroduces briefly the development of metaphor and the previous studies on grammatical metaphor at first, thenreviews contrastive studies of GM in English and Chinese and summarizes GM in various discourses to show itsefficiency for unpacking texts. Chapter three is theoretical framework which mainly devoted to discussingHalliday’s model of Grammatical Metaphor as a basis of contrastive analyses of opinion columns of English andChinese newspaper. Chapter four is research methodology, which lists the research questions at first, gives abrief introduction to material selection and data collection, nails down research methods and finally presents theway of identification of grammatical metaphor in detail. Chapter five is contrastive analysis and discussions.Based on the data analysis, the author answers the research questions and discusses the results. The last chapteris about conclusion，which sums up the results of research questions. Some implications for English learners arepointed out, which is of great importance to the translation and teaching of English opinion columns. At last, thelimitations of the thesis are proposed.