A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Trump’s Inaugural Address

In recent years,the application of grammatical metaphor(GM)to political discourse analysis has become a popular research field.This study aims at researching the distribution and functions of GMs to find out the meanings,attitudes and textual functions conveyed by Trump in his inaugural address.The study adopts Halliday’s GM theories as the theoretical foundation,functional discourse analysis as the methodological framework and collects the textual and audio data of Trump’s inaugural address from the Cable News Netwok(CNN).According to GM theory,this study researches GMs from the perspectives of both lexicogrammatical and phonological strata.Meanwhile,based on functional discourse analysis,the study takes two steps: lexicogrammatical analysis and meta-functional analysis,to study the distribution and functions of GMs respectively.The three findings are as follows.On GM distribution,the metaphors of transitivity and phonological metaphors are the two dominant GMs.The occurrence of transitive metaphors is 28,taking up 25.7% of the total data.The occurrence of phonological metaphors is 85,taking up 78% of the total data.On GM function,the metaphors of transitivity generally develop the argument and become marks of power and prestige by nominalization.The tonality metaphors replace or strengthen the functions of conjunctions and replace textual metaphors,which incites the audience’s emotion better.The tonicity metaphors create new meaning focuses.On the functions of congruent expression,the congruent expressions of interpersonal metaphors are adopted to obscure the details of proposals and to conceal Trump’s personal attitudes under some plural pronouns or impersonal subjects.The study is hoped for offering scholars a perspective of GM study in political discourse analysis and helping learners better understand the meanings,attitudes and communicative functions of the address.