The Analysis Of Interpersonal Garmmatical Metaphors In American TV Seires Gossip Girl

As one of the most important methods of comprehending the world, metaphor is acommon and universal language phenomenon. Its earliest studies can be traced back toancient great philosopher Aristotle who was treated as the first scholar studying metaphor in arelative systematic way. However, most studies concerning about metaphor put forward byresearchers and scholars at home and abroad had been confined to lexical level. It was M.A.K.Halliday who takes the initiative to carry out a systematic study on metaphor from the pointof grammatical level. And that is regarded as the real beginning of the conscious study ongrammatical metaphor (GM). When comparing with the traditional metaphors, grammaticalmetaphors attach great importance to the variation in the expression of a given meaning.According to Halliday, interpersonal grammatical metaphors (interpersonal GMs) refer to themetaphorical phenomenon that occurs in the interpersonal communication event whichexpress interpersonal meaning. There are two systems—mood system and modality system—in the interpersonal metafunction, and similarly, interpersonal GMs can be divided intometaphors of mood and metaphors of modality.In the past decades, lots of researches about interpersonal GMs have been conducted bydifferent scholars, and their study mostly focuses on the exploration of classification andrepresentation. In recent years, some scholars started to analyze the functions of interpersonalGMs in different kinds of discourse, such as political address, news, reports, and poetries andso on. However, their selection of the written discourse is in a dominant position, whereasmaking light of the spoken one. This thesis makes an attempt to analyze the spokendiscourse--some conversations from the American TV series Gossip Girl. By applyingHalliday’s systemic functional grammar (SFG), the thesis aims to analyze the conversationsbetween different interlocutors in the eighteen episodes in the first season of the TV series, tofind out whether interpersonal GMs exist in it and tries to explore different functions ofinterpersonal GMs in the process of communication. According to the functional analysis, wecan reach a conclusion that interpersonal GMs are frequently used in the conversations of theTV series, and their appearance are closely linked to the context of the situation. What’s more, by employing interpersonal GMs, the interlocutors can promote their interaction moreeffectively, which also makes great contribution to demonstrating their opinions and attitudesas well as assisting them to achieve their communicative purposes and aims.This thesis further indicates that SFG presents a multi-level and multi-functiontheoretical framework for discourse analysis. The interpersonal GMs, as one of its theories,are very important to the analysis of this TV series, which can help us have a better and morecomprehensive understanding of the American TV series Gossip Girl.