A Study Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor In American University Introductions

The university introduction plays an increasingly important part in displaying the university’s image to the world,strengthening foreign exchange and cooperation and improving international popularity.At present,many universities throughout the world have set up their own English websites to meet the demand of foreign scholars and students.Certain research achievements have been obtained in genre analysis and translation of university introductions in recent years,but there is little analysis of grammatical metaphors in university introductions.Metaphor is a common language phenomenon and is widely used in people’s daily life,but it has been studied at lexical level for most time in human history.The concept of grammatical metaphor(GM)was first proposed by Halliday(1985)in An Introduction to Functional Grammar.He believed that metaphor exists at the grammatical level as well.Halliday initially divided GM into ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors.In a paper published in 1996,Halliday reclassified the ideational grammatical metaphor(IGM)into 13 types based on a comprehensive discussing of grammatical metaphor syndrome.Halliday’s reclassification of IGM not only broadens the extension of GM theory,but also makes an important contribution to the study of metaphor.The university introductions of 30 out of the top 100 American universities in the American National University Ranking in 2021 are randomly selected as the corpus for this study.Within the framework of the 13 types of IGM in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar(SFG),this thesis studies the introductions in the websites of these 30 American universities to explore the use of IGM in American university introductions(AUIs)and also discuss how IGM in AUIs can successfully achieve the purpose of publicity.Three questions are explored in this study:1)How are the 13 types of IGMs distributed in AUIs?2)How are the 13 types of IGMs realized in AUIs through class-shift and rank-shift?3)What stylistic functions do the IGMs in AUIs mainly perform?Through the study,it is found that IGMs are abundant in AUIs;six types of IGMs,namely Type 1(adjective→noun),Type 2(verb→noun),Type 5(verb→adjective),Type 6(preposition(al phrase)→adjective),Type 12(+verb)and Type 13(noun/adverb/prepositional phrase→[various])are very rich in AUIs.Besides,although Type 3(preposition(al phrase)→noun),Type 9(conjunction→verb)and Type 10(conjunction→preposition(al phrase))appear in the corpus,they are comtartively rare.The remaining types of IGMs: Type 4(conjunction→noun),Type 7(conjunction→adjective),Type 8(preposition(al phrase)→verb)and Type 11(+noun)do not appear at all in the self-built AUI corpus.Moreover,the results suggest that nominalization has the highest frequency within class-shift,followed by adjectivisation;both verbalization and prepositionalization are very rare in AUIs.Additionally,through the comparative analysis between the MCAV(most congruent agnate variant)and its metaphorical variant in AUIs,it is found that in most cases class-shift will cause the downward rank-shift simultaneously,but there may also be cases where the rank scale does not shift,such as the shift from figure with Process to figure with Process as Thing.Although there is a class-shift(verb→noun),the rank scale is still a figure.Last but not least,this study also explores the stylistic functions of IGM in AUIs.IGMs exert their stylistic functions through the violation of conventional “incongruity” and “deflection” distribution in AUIs.Their“overuse” in AUIs is a “motivated prominence” related to situational context,and has the stylistic functions in making some of stylistic semantic features salient,such as objectivity,accuracy and conciseness of AUIs.This thesis contributes to both theory and practice.Theoretically,the feasibility of the GM theory in discourse analysis is proved again,and the research scope of GM is also expanded.In practice,the study helps to deepen readers’ understanding of IGMs in AUIs.In the meantime,the findings of this study also provide reference for the English version of Chinese university introductions(CUIs)and promote academic exchanges and cooperation between colleges and universities at home and abroad.