A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In The English Version Of Government Work Report In 2015

Government Work Report is an official document that has attracted people’s great attention. The English version of it is translated by a group of translation experts who are in the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Then it receives modification of foreign experts who come from English-speaking countries.In 1985 Halliday firstly put forward Grammatical Metaphor theory. According to him, there are two kinds of Grammatical Metaphors: ideational Grammatical Metaphor and interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor. Ideational Grammatical Metaphor includes 13 types, while interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor contains metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality. Later, some scholars, for example, Martin and Thompson, etc. think that textual Grammatical Metaphor is also a kind of Grammatical Metaphor, just like ideational Grammatical Metaphor and interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor. This thesis tries to analyze the English version of Government Work Report in 2015 in the perspective of Grammatical Metaphor. Examples will also be provided in order to illustrate the opinion better.According to our research, there are 7 types of ideational Grammatical Metaphor in the English version of Government Work Report in 2015. The most widely used are type 2 and type 13. These two kinds of ideational Grammatical Metaphor can make the English version of Government Work Report in 2015 more formal. At the same time the employment of ideational Grammatical Metaphor can express meaning in a clear way by integrating more than one clause into a sentence.Based on previous studies, this research tries to analyze textual Grammatical Metaphor in terms of Metaphorical Theme and Metaphorical News. The former includes thematic equative, predicated theme, and theme comment sentence. Passive voice and some methods to emphasize new information, for example capital, stress etc. are the methods of realizing Metaphorical News. The discussion of textual Grammatical Metaphor in this thesis is based on this classification. The result shows that textual Grammatical Metaphor is also employed in the English version of Government Work Report in 2015 with passive voice is the main method of realization. The employment of passive voice can show the modesty of Chinese government. It also can help people get key information better. Besides these, the use of passive voice plays an important role in the progression of theme-rheme structure in the English version of Government Work Report in 2015.However, there is no sign showing the existence of interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor in the English version of Government Work Report in 2015. It means modal verbs used in it can be ignored. It usually objectively states what government has done in the last year and what they will do in the next year.