An Analysis Of English News Discourses From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

The origin of metaphor study can be traced back to the rhetorical study in ancient Greece. Since then, countless philosophers, litterateurs, rhetoricians and linguists have been showing great interest in it by carrying out enlightening studies that have continued to this day. Among the various theories in this field, the concept of"grammatical metaphor"(GM) has been an academic hotspot in the past few decades. Such a theory was first put forward by M. A. K. Halliday and later developed by himself as well as many other scholars.However, opinions are divided about its definition and types. What is more, the leading accomplishments, obtained by Halliday and Martin, mainly deal with nominalization in scientific texts. Rare are the studies of the function of GM and its application to a particular genre. As far as the news discourse goes, there are many different approaches to its research, including critical analysis, content analysis and traditional genre analysis, etc., whereas GM-based explorations are few and far between.This thesis attempts to explore news discourses on the basis of GM theories with editorials and brief news reports as the objects of study. All the texts of the two varieties are excerpts from New York Time of United States and The Times of United Kingdom. The choice of such objects of study is made with a view to revealing the internal relationship between textual characteristics of news discourses and grammatical metaphors so as to enable readers to have a proper understanding of them. The argumentation of the thesis is done by means of data analysis, with the aim of demonstrating the universality of GM and how it works in news discourses represented by editorials and brief news reports.The thesis falls into four parts besides an introduction.Before the first part is a brief introduction to the general framework of the present study, including its background, purposes and significances.The first part is devoted to the literature review concerning GM theories and news discourse study. Halliday's theory of GM comes first, followed by studies of other linguists, including some Chinese linguists. Lastly, the thesis offers an elaboration of the characteristics of news discourses and previous researches done in this field, preceded by an explanation of the underlying reasons for the choice of these two particular discourse genres as the research objects.The second part gives a detailed presentation of classifications of GM and the ways for their realization. These two aspects serve as the foundation for the discussion of news discourses that follow. Meanwhile, this part also introduces some other theories relevant to GM, namely, Register Theory, Politeness Principle, Theme Structure and Information Structure, as well as the Theory of Cohesion and Coherence.The third part begins with a description of the sources of study objects, the corpora, the way they are handled, and the corresponding statistical findings. Next comes a minute analysis of the corpora, including an elucidation of the linguistic characteristics and the form of expression of the grammatical metaphor in news discourses. All these bring to light how GM has an important effect on journalistic writings.As the essence of the whole thesis, this part contains a creative point therein. The previous analyses of the grammatical metaphor in discourses were conducted mainly from the perspective of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor, caring little for textual metaphor. The study of textual GM is a new realm in the field of metaphor study, and such a study directed to news discourses has not yet come to the full attention of the academic world. It is just for this reason that this thesis makes a tentative research on textual GM in news discourses. The findings based on the data analysis show that textual GM really exists in news discourses and plays a great role in constructing news discourses. It is realized mainly by five means, namely, meta-message relation, text reference, negotiating texture, internal conjunction and metaphorical theme/metaphorical news. These means make news discourses not only clearer and more understandable, but also more coherent. From all this, it can be seen that the angle of view for the analysis of grammatical metaphors can go beyond the perspective of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor to textual metaphor. The analysis of textual metaphor could provide a new visual angle for the analysis of the grammatical metaphor in news discourses. Meanwhile, it could also deepen the theory of cohesion and coherence and lay a preparatory foundation for the perfection of the theory of GM, thereby providing some inspiration for the analysis of textual metaphor in other varieties of English.The fourth part, also the last part, is a brief summary of the thesis with some tentative conclusions.