An Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In Business Column Of The Economist

Metaphor has long been concerned by linguists. According to traditionalviews, metaphor is regarded as some kind of rhetorical technique, whilecontemporary views like cognitive perspective of metaphor have been morecreative than before, still it is limited in lexical metaphor level. Hallidayfirstly puts forward the existence of metaphor in grammatical level on thebasis of Systemic Functional Grammar, and his grammatical metaphor theoryhas provided a brand new perspective for the metaphor studies of the time.Grammatical metaphor consists of ideational, interpersonal and textualgrammatical metaphor. In light of Halliday and Martin’s grammaticalmetaphor theory, this thesis has made a preliminary research on20papers ofbusiness news from20issues of business column in The Economist withqualitative and quantitative analysis as the research method, aiming toaddressing following two questions:1) What is the distribution feature of grammatical metaphor in businesscolumn of The Economist, what are the main realization forms?2) What are the functions of the grammatical metaphors? How do theycoordinate with each other to serve for the whole discourse? The main findings of this research are: firstly, a lot of grammaticalmetaphor exists in business column of The Economist. Among it, ideationaland textual grammatical metaphor account for a large share at45%and47%respectively, yet interpersonal grammatical metaphor only occupies a smallproportion at3%. Secondly, the main realization forms of ideationalgrammatical metaphor are adjectivization and nominalization. Ininterpersonal grammatical metaphor, the main realization form of metaphorsof mood is statement function by interrogative mood; whereas the mainrealization form of metaphors of modality is explicitly subjective expression.As for textual grammatical metaphor, the main realization form ofmetaphorical themes is marked theme, and the main realization form ofmetaphorical news is marked news. Thirdly, ideationalgrammatical metaphor in business column has three functions: downgrading,information packing and experience re-construing; interpersonal grammaticalmetaphor is able to assist writers’ expression of subjective opinions ormodality orientation, and adjust interpersonal relationship; With respect totextual grammatical metaphor, it principally has two functions: salientfunction and cohesive function. Besides, the three major types ofgrammatical metaphor in business column are not independent, but interactive to form a synergy so as to serve for the whole discourse.