| Grammatical metaphor theory is first introduced by Halliday (1985/1994) and later further developed by Halliday himself and Martin (1992). In the preceding decade, the ideational metaphor theory has gained general recognition but the interpersonal metaphor theory, though an important constituent of the grammatical metaphor theory construct, is far from being mature to the extent that even Halliday and Hasan themselves have publicly admitted that there are much work to be done in the construction of interpersonal metaphor theory. Speech act theory, considered as a main theory in pragmatics, is slowing down its development in the contemporary linguistic literature. This thesis, after a brief overview of the independent research situations between interpersonal metaphor and speech act theory, proposes and explores the theoretical possibility of the complementarity between Halliday's interpersonal metaphor and speech act theory, with a detailed discussion first on the complementary bases and then on the specific complementary aspects.The revisit to both theories in Chapter 2 falls into two parts. The first part, based on an explanation of Halliday's ideas about congruence, mainly dwells on Halliday's model of interpersonal metaphors, namely metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality, which are realized in the mood and modality systems. The second part gives a brief recount of the ideas proposed by the main figures in the speech act theory, Austin, Searle and Jenny Thomas. It is pointed out that the speech act theory is first advanced by Austin from the philosophical perspectives as a fight against the truth-conditional semantics, while Searle on the basis of the work previously done by Austin, further develops the theory. In the 1990's, Jenny Thomas argues from an interaction perspective that speech acts should be studied dynamically. That is, meaning is negotiated through the interaction between both the speaker and the hearer under the considerations of context and background knowledge.The complementarity between speech act theory and interpersonal metaphor is firmly based on three common grounds, namely philosophical background, theoretical aims and language as action, which will be discussed in turn in Chapters.Philosophically, speech act theory and interpersonal metaphor have much in common. For one thing, language users are introduced into the linguistic study. The attentions of the two theories are both directed at the study of social interactions between human beings. For another, the relationships between language, language users and the world are the major concern of both theories. Motivated by the philosophical thinking about these relationships, philosophers of the ordinary language school like Austin and Searle developed the speech act theory and thus freed linguistic studies from the constraints of traditional linguistics which confines its studies only within the abstract linguistic system. Halliday, in an attempt to represent his philosophical ideas about the above-mentioned relationships, advances the interpersonal metaphor theory. He believes that language itself is a grammatical metaphor and that there is a metaphorizing and demetaphorizing relationship between language and the world. Besides, human interactions are a dynamic process, construing experience and realizing social relationships as well. Second, speech act theory and interpersonal metaphor's theoretical aims are almost the same. To employ Thompson's (1996) terminology, we can argue that both theories have the same theoretical target?the indirect speech acts. In fact, speech act theory and interpersonal metaphor both consider language use as their core of study, trying to explain the same linguistic phenomena of incongruence between form and function but differ in perspectives or terminology. In systemic-functional linguistics, Halliday tries to put these kinds of linguistic phenomena under the category of interpersonal metaphors while in pragmatics, they are tackled by the speech act theory. Third, speech a...
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