Grammatical Metaphors In Commencement Speeches Of Chinese And American Universities

The commencement speech is a special kind of public speaking and has become an important part of the campus culture.It is the "last course" that the school offers to graduating students.The speaker tries to convey his thoughts and ideas through his speech,aiming to influence or even change the hearer's attitude or behavior.This goes in accordance with the interpersonal function elucidated by Halliday.Interpersonal grammatical metaphor,as an important part of grammatical metaphor,is a major realization of interpersonal meaning.Besides,language has the ideational function,which construes human experience and can be realized by ideational metaphor.Both ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor constitute the core of Grammatical Metaphor(GM)theory,which has been widely applied to the analysis of political discourse,news discourse,advertisement discourse,etc.Based on Halliday's theory of grammatical metaphor,this thesis aims to present a comparative study of the distribution and characteristics of the realization of grammatical metaphors in commencement speeches of Chinese and American universities.Ten commencement speeches from China and ten commencement speeches from America are chosen randomly as the research object and both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied in the analysis of both ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor.The research result shows that grammatical metaphor prevails both in the Chinese commencement speeches(shortened as CCS)and English commencement speeches(shortened as ECS).Despite the differences in social and cultural backgrounds,there exist similarities and differences in the actual realizations of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and American contexts.In the study of ideational metaphor,the author finds that nominalization is employed the most frequently in both CCS and ECS.As for the study of the metaphor of modality,a subtype of interpersonal metaphor,the parameters of type,orientation,value and polarity are investigated and the research shows that modulation is much more prevalent in CCS whereas ECS has a relatively higher frequency in the use of high-value modality.Moreover,Chinese's use of medium-value modality exceeds that of English and explicit subjective orientation and positive polarity take dominance in both Chinese speeches and English speeches.The analysis of metaphor of mood indicates that the interrogative mood can express statements metaphorically in both ECS and CCS.Yet,the metaphorical use of the declarative mood and the imperative mood cannot be found in CCS but cases of the declarative mood for commands and the imperative mood for statements occur in ECS in the chosen samples.The purpose of the thesis is to locate the differences and similarities in the realizations of grammatical metaphor in commencement speeches in Chinese and American universities.The research aims to extend the application of GM theory to Chinese discourse and even the Chinese language and to offer a new perspective for the study of commencement speeches.Practically,the research results can enhance the awareness of intercultural communication and help English learners in China understand both languages better.