An Ideological Study On Grammatical Metaphor In News Discourse

Halliday’s Grammatical Metaphor (GM) refers to the transition of lexical grammar, that is "the same signified, but different signifiers". It contains Ideational GM and Interpersonal GM. The former consists of process configuration and nominalization, and the latter includes modality metaphor and mood metaphor. Functional grammar proposes that form realizes meaning, and different forms realize different meanings. Then metaphorical form will communicate some different meanings compared with congruent form. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) aims at disclosing the complicated relation between language, power and ideology. It holds that language and ideology are closely interwoven, and many linguistic features, including metaphors, grammar, presupposition and implicature are potentially ideological. And what CDA does is to explore the ideologies hidden behind these linguistic properties.Due to the unequal power and status between reporters and readers, news report can never be truly objective and real, so are foreign media’s reports about China issues. Based on certain ideology and political interests, they usually apply lots of linguistic devices, and GM is one of them.This study takes Halliday’s GM theory as the theoretical basis. In order to explore the ideologies hidden behind the use of GM, this thesis makes a critical analysis of GM in the 16 reports about Kunming violent and terrorist attack in New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The followings are the results of this study. The quantitative analysis finds that for Ideational GM, reporters prefer process transference between material process and relational process and nominalization; and for International GM, reporters use explicit objective modality most. And this distribution is closely related to the ideology. The qualitative analysis finds that these two official medias distort the terrorist nature of this incident into a protest of Uighurs, defame Chinese government, and criticize it for disrespecting human rights, discriminating and repressing minorities. The ideologies hidden behind are summarized as follows:American government uses media to distort facts in order to promote materialist values such as freedom, democracy, and human right in the single manifestation they advocated. On one hand, it disintegrates China and destroys ethnic unity; on the other hand, it westernizes China, which can successfully achieve its "peaceful evolution" of China, and can finally realize its dream of dominating the world.