Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese News Discourse: A Contrastive Approach

Along with the flourishing of metaphor research, grammatical metaphor, as an indispensable part of systemic-functional linguistics, which is seemingly a rather bizarre term, nowadays has gained more and more recognition in the international academic field and has also aroused increasing interest from Chinese linguists. Some scholars have also touched upon the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in the Chinese language based on Halliday's implicit statement of the universality of grammatical metaphor. Many studies have shown that grammatical metaphor theory is not only of theoretical significance, contributing a lot to the philosophy of language, but also applicable in the unpacking of a variety of discourses in different registers. One of the fruitful research areas is the grammatical metaphor phenomenon in scientific discourse. This thesis tends to extend the applied study of grammatical metaphor to the news discourse, which is one of the important public discourses and imposes great influence on our lives and society. The approach adopted in this thesis is a contrastive one with an aim at demonstrating the universality of grammatical metaphor and exploring the similarities and differences of their functions in English and Chinese news discourse.The whole thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 serves as a brief introduction to the general framework of the present study. Then a review of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, its latest development and the relevant studies by other linguists on the metaphorical nature of grammar is dealt with in Chapter 2. The next chapter, Chapter 3, offers an illustration of the characteristics of news discourse and previous research work done in this field, explaining the underlying reason why this particular discourse genre is chosen as our study object. It is suggested that in news discourse grammatical metaphors are employed as specific linguistic devices to create and sustain the impression of objectivity and neutrality. Chapter 4is devoted to the detailed analyses of our collected data and a summary of the findings of our contrastive study of grammatical metaphor's functions in news discourse. Through data analyses, we clarify the six textual functions of grammatical metaphor in news discourse, namely, the referring or naming function, the expanding function, the condensing function, the discursive function, the ideological function and the optimalizing functioa Meanwhile, their similarities and differences in English and Chinese news discourse are discussed in this chapter. Moreover, Chapter 4 also discusses the implications of our grammatical metaphor study, which not only suggests that communication should be promoted between scholars on Chinese research and linguists on foreign language research, but offers a new understanding of the relationship between language, man and the world. Then the last chapter, Chapter 5, provides a brief summary of the thesis and at the same time some tentative conclusions are drawn.