Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese News Reports

The significance of the grammatical metaphor (GM) theory to systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as well as to metaphor studies has been generally acknowledged. Although the term sounds rather bizarre, as a matter of fact, (GM) has become an indispensable part in the metaphor research. According to Halliday (1994) and Thompson (1996) in SFL, GM refers to a metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexicogrammatical form, which originally evolved to express a more congruent kind of meaning. The study of GM contributes to exploring the nature of metaphor by providing a new approach. Based on the framework of GM theory in SFL, this thesis, by a contrastive analysis between English and Chinese news reports collected from the authoritative news agencies from home and abroad, is intended to verify the universality of GM and explore the similarities and differences in English and Chinese news reports.Halliday classifies GM as ideational and interpersonal metaphors/According to this classification, different methods are adopted in the contrastive analysis of the two different GMs. Since this thesis is aiming to discuss the GMs in the news reports, only the GMs which are closely related to the news reports are discussed instead of all its subcategories.In the discussion of ideational GM, at the beginning, the exemplifications of 13 types of GM concluded by Halliday after a study of English scientific discourse are compared in the English and Chinese news reports, respectively from UN Daily News and UN Daily News (Chinese edition). After the comparison, we find that mostly applied ideational GM among all the types is nominalization, which is studied from its types of structure and texual functions in the next discussion. By the contrastive study of its types of structure, it is concluded that English is an inflectional language with rich affixes, which is unlike Chinese language. Therefore, different types of affixes can be added to a word and be transformed into a noun While Chinese is a language lacking inflectional change, there is only change of syntactic function instead of the morphological one when a Chinese verb or adjective functions as an entity. At the end of the discussion of nominalization, the five textual functions of nominalization are given and compared. They are referring function, expanding function, condensing function, discursive function and ideological function. By a data-based contrastive study, we find that GM helps to optimalize the structure of news discourse.Similarly, in the discussion of interpersonal GM, due to the length limit of this thesis and the abovementioned reason, the emphasis are attached to the metaphor of modality, while omitting the treatment of metaphor of mood. First, the two representations of metaphor of modality are given: explicit subjective orientation and explicit objective orientation. In this part, we conduct a quantitative contrastive analysis in the occurrence frequency of two orientations involving metaphor of modality and try to explore the similarities and differences of metaphors of modality in both English and Chinese news reports. Among the ten pieces news collected, five English pieces are from Washington Post and the other five ones are from People's DailyThe statistics shows that in the comparison of the metaphors of modality, the occurrence frequency of the explicit objective orientation is much higher than the explicit subjective in both English and Chinese news reports. This is because in news report, the journalists are supposed to report an event in an objective, neutral and impersonal way. By the explicit objective orientation in modality, the journalists make the personal views indisputable fact or natural characteristics by dressing up the modality to the proposition in the form of projecting clauses so that the readers are more inclined to believing what they've read is true.However, in the explicit subjective orientation in modality, its frequency shows a bit higher in English news reports than in Chinese ones. The reason for this difference may lie in the fact that People's Daily is one of the most important and authoritative newspapers in china, and it has long been in the dominant position in journalism. One of its important roles is to guide the public opinion in the correct direction and readers have been accustomed to getting opinions directly from the authority in the news paper to adjust their own opinions. However, Washington Post seems to pay more attention to making people believe in what they say and then influencing readers' point of view in a disguised way.That the idea of GM is brought forth serves as a great milestone in the history of metaphor study. The reason for choosing news reports as the research object lies in the fact that news discourse is one of the important public discourses and imposes great influence on our lives and society, and its own features are closely related to the existence of GM.This study clearly shows that by exploring these GMs, it is of great value and importance for us to have a better understanding and command of the features of news reports, give enlightenment on the further study of GM in Chinese, E-C or C-E translation and Chinese language teaching.