A Study Of Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor In English Academic Book Review

As a sub-genre of academic discourse, academic book review has received far less attention than the other sub-genres such as research papers. However, because it can promote academic exchanges by evaluating academic works critically and publicly, it is academically invaluable. In the very recent years, some scholars (e.g. Li 1996; Tang 2004, 2005.) have begun to make some researches on this genre and it deserves more attention.This thesis, based on the theoretical framework of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, ventures to investigate the interpersonal metaphor in English academic book reviews. The significance of the thesis lies in two aspects. First, it may facilitate the understanding of academic book review; second, its attempt may provide a new angle for this specific genre study and widen the range of interpersonal metaphor in discourse analysis.For the convenience of study, adopting Tang's data collecting method, choosing 15 linguistic English academic book reviews extracted from linguistic journals or websites abroad as corpus and using a qualitative and interpretative approach to discourse analysis, the present study discusses how interpersonal grammatical metaphors are generally realized in English academic book review.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1 starts with the introduction of research purpose, significance and methodology. Chapter 2 presents a literature review of previous studies of academic book reviews. Chapter 3 elaborates the theoretical framework of interpersonal grammatical metaphor within Systemic Functional Grammar. Chapter 4 involves a detailed analysis and discussion of the collected data. Chapter 5 concludes by summarizing the major findings of the research, by discussing the linguistic and pedagogical contributions of the study, and by suggesting limitations and further directions for the research. The present study demonstrates the idea that Systemic Functional Grammar provides an ideal multi-level and multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis. What's more, the study of this thesis attempts to contribute to comprehensively understanding book reviews and improving non-native learners'academic reading and writing skills.