Ideational Metaphor In Business Discourses

Grammatical metaphor (GM), a concept initiated by M. A. K. Halliday, is divided into two subcategories: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. It is deemed as "variation" in the expression of meaning, which is not limited at lexical level merely, but also located in grammatical level. And the fact that nominalization is the single most powerful resource in ideational metaphor has also been universally acknowledged among functional linguists. However, previous studies on ideational metaphor mainly concentrated on discussing the roles of grammatical metaphor in scientific discourses, but few scholars employ ideational metaphor systematically in business texts in spite of many insightful ideas about ideational metaphor in scientific discourses.On the basis of Ravelli's classification of 9 general types of ideational metaphor, the present author divides them into four general types (nominalization, adjectivization, verbalization and embedded clause) to make them manageable in the analysis and carries out a systematic analysis of what roles each type of ideational metaphor plays at all levels of a business text. Meanwhile, the attempt to combine presupposition 1 and nominalization has also revealed the objectivity of nominalization from another angle. In addition, as to the question of whether nominalization is unmarked form for written English or merely for scientific English, the analysis of various business texts has also to some extent supported Professor Hu Zhuangli's assertion that nominalization is not reserved solely for scientific English but an unmarked form for written English.Finally, the thesis makes a tentative investigation into the significance of ideational metaphor in sentence generation and translation. Last but not least, indiscriminate use of nominalizations, a practice of sacrificing brevity for a complicated sentence structure, has been criticized as a result of its obsoleteness.