Grammatical Metaphor In CEO Speeches Of Annual General Meeting

This thesis is a new attempt to study speech discourses in the light of grammatical metaphor in the systemic-functional grammar with a focus on how various types of grammatical metaphors contribute to the construction of successful Annual General Meeting (AGM) CEO Speeches.As the study on grammatical metaphor (GM) from systemic-functional approach is initiated by M.A.K.Halliady, the thesis expounds Halliday's grammatical theory based on the comparative analysis of lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor and the elucidation of the term of "congruent" as well. Other scholars' contributions to grammatical metaphor theory are introduced in the thesis including Fan's model of GM (Fan, 2001) in configuration of transitivity function, Zhu and Yan's (Zhu & Yan, 2001) work on prototype and Martin and Fan's (Martin, 1992 & Fan, 2001) contribution to logical GM. AGM CEO Speeches are selected as my focus of study with both quantitative and qualitative approaches adopted. The data collected include 15 AGM CEO Speeches of different companies randomly chosen from the year of 2004 to the year of 2006, with five speeches respectively from each year. Based on the theory and approach elucidated in Part II, the linguistic characteristics of grammatical metaphor in AGM CEO Speeches are analyzed and specific grammatical metaphors are found. The analysis in this thesis demonstrates that abundant grammatical metaphors do exist in AGM CEO Speeches just as in formal written discourses. They mainly occur in the form of nominalization which is the main source of grammatical metaphor in the present corpus as it is in scientific discourse. The frequent co-occurrence of nominalizations and logical metaphors not only contributes to the coherence of the discourse but also helps to make AGM CEO Speeches academic and professional. Also, unique linguistic features of Prepared Public Speech (PPS) are endowed by the abundance of interpersonal metaphors and textual metaphors in AGM CEO Speeches, which helps the speakers to achieve the purpose of the speech. AGM CEO Speeches, as a kind of PPS, are worthy of our study. Since little concern has been given to researches on speech discourse in the light of grammatical metaphor (GM), this thesis has provided a new angle to the study of speech discourses and to some degree, enriched the practice of GM study.