A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese Public Speech Discourse

The study of metaphor takes really a long history. Beginning from the 1960s, linguists and philosophers have been making a comprehensive study of the phenomenon of metaphor. The study of metaphor has achieved fruitful and ample accomplishments from the perspective of functionalist and cognition. Grammatical metaphor occupies an important position in Halliday's systemic functional theory, which makes a great contribution to the research of contemporary metaphor. Large quantities of evidence and research demonstrate that the theory of grammatical metaphor is not only of theoretical significance, but also can be applied in decoding a variety of discourse configuration. Grammatical metaphor was first put forward by Halliday and other scholars at home and abroad make a further study in this field.This thesis uses the method of contrastive analysis to verify the fact that grammatical metaphor is a common phenomenon in the field of language. The reason why I choose the discourse of public speech is that it has the effectiveness of operation and the value of being used in practice. Public speeches are always manuscripts which have been examined and polished up. All those selected public speeches are downloaded from official websites, such as Http://www.people.com, Http://www.whitehouse.gov,Http://www.gov.cn,Http://www.cctv.com,Http://www.enmajor.com. In order to ensure the feasibility of comparing the two kinds of public speeches, all those public speeches we selected are delivered by political leaders both in English and Chinese. We also pay attention to the amount of words and style in English and Chinese public speeches. The final goal is to make the comparison more obvious between English and Chinese public speeches.The main purpose of this thesis is to use the method of contrastive analysis, attempting to find out the similarities and differences in English and Chinese public speech discourses. It is quite beneficial for us to dig out and reveal the hidden characteristics of discourse and the obscure ideology in the future. It can help the audience and listeners to have a better understanding of the discourse and text. This thesis is expected to verify the objective fact that it is common to find a lot of grammatical metaphors in public speech. We can further make clear how metaphor displays its role in public speech, so as to apply the findings to English-Chinese translation.The thesis attempts to answer the following questions: Can grammatical metaphor be applied to the analysis of public speech discourses? Are there any similarities and differences in grammatical metaphor between English and Chinese public speech discourses? What kinds of grammatical metaphors are used in English and Chinese public speech discourses? Can we use the implications of this thesis to help translate English grammatical metaphors into Chinese? The significance of this thesis consists in the fact that it is a contrastive study of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese public speech discourses. It offers a new insight into the contrastive analysis of this kind of discourses. In addition, it can provide some helpful tips for the translation of English grammatical metaphors into Chinese. To make the study more logical and reasonable, we first make a brief introduction of grammatical metaphor both at home and abroad, and then we take an overview of public speech, including its definition, classification and general features. In Chapter Two, it lays a solid foundation for Chapter Three and Chapter Four. This thesis makes a systemic-functional approach to grammatical metaphor and the transitivity system, especially transference across different processes and within one process, nominalization, and verbalization. We can have a better understanding of Chapter Three and Chapter Four, so Chapter Two occupies a very important position.This thesis strives to make a contrastive analysis of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese public speech discourses. We want to verify the fact that grammatical metaphor can be found both in English and Chinese public speech. The number of ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors in English public speeches is much larger than that in Chinese public speeches. The realization of ideational metaphor has something to do with the transitivity system, nominalization and verbalization. This thesis also wants to prove that a larger number of nominalization and verbalization can be found in Chinese public speeches than those in English public speeches. In terms of interpersonal metaphor, metaphors of modality are more popular than metaphors of mood in public speech. Finally, this thesis wants to apply the findings into the usage of translation and gives some implications for the work of English-Chinese translation. We can draw a conclusion from research and observation that: when we translate English public speeches into Chinese, the translator will take different strategies. We can also find some rules that: in English-Chinese translation, when we meet nouns in English, we always take the strategy of verbalization to translate a noun into a verb; in transference within one process in English public speech, if the English takes on passive form, it usually becomes an active form when it is translated into Chinese; in transference across different processes, we can see that there are a large number of transferences from relational process to material process when public speeches are translated from English into Chinese.Though this thesis selects 14 public speeches from official websites, the resources are limited to some extent. The statistics mentioned in this thesis can not be absolutely exact, while the results in a way can roughly reflect what this thesis wants to verify. This thesis needs further improvement.