Grammatical Metaphor In American Presidential And British Premier Inaugural Addresses

Metaphor is a very important phenomenon and has been a significant research focus in linguistic field. From the traditional lexical metaphor, to the contemporary cognitive metaphor and grammatical metaphor, metaphor has long been paid a lot of attention to. However, how to define metaphor has been a controversy among different linguistic approaches. Grammatical metaphor is an important concept in functional grammar, which has both difference and connection with lexical metaphor. Grammatical metaphor has provided a brand-new perspective for human being to reconstruct world experience. Halliday accounted for this language phenomenon exclusively in his Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985. He referred to two types of grammatical metaphor, the ideational grammatical metaphor and the interpersonal grammatical metaphor. Martin supplemented some elements into grammatical metaphor and put forward the conception of textual grammatical metaphor in 1992.This thesis will be based on the theory of the ideational grammatical metaphor and the interpersonal grammatical metaphor to analyze the selected corpora of ten representative American presidential and British premier inaugural addresses. From the detailed analysis we will find that grammatical metaphor provides a new commentarial criterion for the political public speaking discourse. Through flexible employment of grammatical metaphor, speakers can draw support from audiences and persuade them so that his political intention can be realized ingenuously. At the same time, audiences will see clearly the real intention and purpose of the speaker from the glorious and persuasive political public speaking if they have a good command of grammatical metaphor.