A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Grammatical Metaphors In University Commencement Speeches

Grammatical metaphor was proposed by Halliday in the book An Introduction to Functional Grammar published in 1985.Grammatical metaphor is a metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexico-grammatical form,which originally expresses a congruent meaning.Since its birth,it has gained much attention from many scholars at home and abroad.And the theory has also become much more mature and has been used in discourse analyses.In light of grammatical metaphor theory,some scholars have focused their studies on scientific,advertising,political and news discourses and they also have made comparative studies of grammatical metaphors in English and Chinese discourses.All these studies have shown that grammatical metaphor theory is not only of theoretical significance but also applicable in the unpacking of a variety of discourses.Considering there are few studies on university commencement speeches,in this thesis,we have conducted a comparative study of English and Chinese grammatical metaphors in the selected university commencement speeches.Based on the grammatical metaphor theory and register theory,we have solved the following questions:(1)What are English and Chinese grammatical metaphors occurring in the selected corpus?(2)What are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese grammatical metaphors occurring in the selected corpus?(3)What are the motivations and functions of English and Chinese grammatical metaphors occurring in the selected corpus?Through the analyses,the following conclusions can be made:(1)Grammatical metaphors,including ideational grammatical metaphor,interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor exist universally in the selected English and Chinese speeches.(2)There are much more similarities than differences between English and Chinese grammatical metaphors in the selected speeches;ideational grammatical metaphor is at the largest position in both English and Chinese speeches;Chinese grammatical metaphors occur much more frequently than English grammatical metaphors in the selected speeches respectively as 85.78%and 63.93%;some other specific similarities and differences lie in either the identification or the distribution of grammatical metaphors.(3)The motivations of grammatical metaphors are sensitive to their functions from a register perspective:the ideational function of ideational grammatical metaphors includes condensing function and expanding function from the perspective of field variables,the interpersonal function of interpersonal grammatical metaphors includes cultivating intimacy function and objectifying function from the perspective of tenor variables and the textual function of textual grammatical metaphors includes attracting attention function and optimizing function from the perspective of mode variables.