A Contrastive Study On The Relationships Between Grammatical Metaphor And Mode Differentiation In English And Chinese Political Discourses

Grammatical Metaphor(GM)is a key concept in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),which is crucial for understanding the relationship between language and context.Therefore,the contextual research of GM has drawn considerable attention from researchers in China and abroad.Given that the study of context is primarily concerned with register theory in SFL,the use of GM is mainly examined by considering three register variables,namely,field,tenor and mode.Although there have been some studies on the relationship between GM and mode,the contribution of GM in mode differentiation has not been investigated in depth so far.This study thus aims to explore the relationship between GM and mode differentiation through a comparative analysis of English and Chinese political discourses.For this purpose,the study seeks to answer two core research questions: 1)how the use of GM is interrelated with the mode differentiation of political discourses;2)what are the differences in GM-mode relationship between English and Chinese political discourses.To address these two core questions,the study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct the detailed analysis.The corpus for this study is formed by 15 English texts and 15 Chinese texts,consisting of three text types distinguished in mode,namely,political reports,political speeches and political interviews.With respect to theoretical foundations,the study chooses Halliday's GM framework and Yang's GM model respectively for the analysis of GM instances in English and those in Chinese.Before probing the GM-mode relationships,the study first defines the mode scale and GM distribution scale respectively in English and Chinese political discourses.The mode scale is demonstrated mainly by measuring the degrees of lexical density and grammatical intricacy of three text types in both English and Chinese.Following this,the study conducts the identification and quantification of GM instances in English and Chinese texts to illustrate GM deployment scales.In addition,the study also compares the GM deployment in English and Chinese texts and interprets the differences from the perspectives of typology and stylistics.After defining the mode scale and GM distribution scale,the study examines how GM deployment connects with mode differentiation in two steps: 1)the establishment of mapping relationships between the lexical density scale and the ideational GM deployment scale;2)the interpretation of the mapping relationships from functional perspectives,including effects of GM on the complexity,organization and ideologies of texts.After that,the study explores the differences in GM-mode relationships between English and Chinese political discourses from two perspectives: 1)the differences in GM's contribution to the complexity between both languages;2)the differences in GM's functions of constructing texts between two languages.The major findings of this study are summarized from three aspects.Firstly,it is found that different political text types,no matter in English or in Chinese,have distinctive degrees of lexical density,which can form a delicate scale,but the degrees of grammatical intricacy do not form a scale as is expected.In addition,the extents of using GM in three text types can also formulate a distribution scale both in English and Chinese.Secondly,it is observed that the mapping relationships between the lexical density scale and the ideational GM distribution scale are well formed both in English and Chinese political discourses,which indicates that the distribution of ideational GM strongly correlates with the lexical density.Such mapping relationships suggest that the deployment of GM is related to mode differentiation,because the use of GM has distinctive effects on the complexity,organization and ideologies of texts in different modes.Thirdly,it is discovered that the GM-mode relationships are different in English and Chinese political discourses,because ideational GM contributes distinctively to the lexical density between two languages.More specifically,nominalization in English texts plays a bigger role in increasing the lexical density,while adjectivation contributes more to the lexical density in Chinese texts.Another reason is that GM functions differently in organizing texts and conveying ideologies in English and Chinese texts.