Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And English Political Speeches: A Contrastive Analysis

Speech is the act of delivering formal spoken idea or opinion to an audience. Large amounts of research have focused on discourse analysis of public speeches. Political speeches, as a form of written for spoken language, are featured for being official but mostly oral. The present study proves the universality of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and English political speeches on the basis of previous studies. This thesis selects 5 discourses respectively from Chinese and English political speech corpora and summarizes categories and quantities of grammatical metaphors in selected discourses. The purpose of the present study is to prove the universal application of systemic functional grammar theory for political discourse analysis.This thesis adopts Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory, along with the contrastive analysis method as well as the quantitative and qualitative methods. Each type of grammatical metaphor is identified in each clause for contrastive analysis. Similarities and differences are concluded and comparatively analyzed. The exploration of similarities and differences of grammatical metaphors is aimed to provide some implications for the audience and translators of political speeches. In the meanwhile, the thesis tries to find out major functions of grammatical metaphors in political speeches, which are referring function, expanding function, condensing function, discursive function and optimalizing function. The study on grammatical metaphor plays an important role as guidance in discourse deconstruction.As the present study only focuses on selected discourses of Chinese and English political speeches, so the research is focused on grammatical metaphors which frequently appear in political speeches instead of all types of grammatical metaphors.