A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And American State Leaders' Discourses

This thesis strives to conduct a contrastive study on Grammatical Metaphor (GM) between American and Chinese state leaders'discourses, attempting to find out the similarities and differences and their causes and apply the findings to the English-Chinese GM translation. The thesis is composed of six chapters and deals with the following issues respectively:Chapter one is a brief introduction about the whole thesis. It introduces the inspiration for the present study, the contents, purposes and significance of the study, data collection and research methods.Chapter two is a literature survey. The thesis is a contrastive study on GM so that it is quite necessary to have a brief review about the previous studies on contrastive linguistics and Grammatical Metaphor by scholars home and abroad. The review gives us a clear picture about what have been studied on these two fields and suggests that it is possible and worthwhile to conduct a contrastive analysis on GM between Chinese and American state leaders'discourses.Chapter three introduces the theoretical framework about Grammatical Metaphor and provides a criterion for the analysis in the following chapters. We contribute some room in this part to the clarification and classification of some basic terms. We distinguish between congruent and metaphorical and various representations of GM. Through the analysis in this part, we propose our study perspective in the thesis.Chapter four is devoted to the contrastive analysis on GM between American and Chinese state leaders'discourses. The similarities and differences of the sample discourses in GM resulting from transference across different processes, GM resulting from transference within one process, GM realized by nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization, metaphors of modality and metaphors of mood are explored in this chapter. It is found that the similarities in the distribution of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor are mainly determined by the characteristics of the genre of the sample discourses in the two languages. Chinese state leaders'discourses are relatively more formal, impersonal and stylized, which is reflected in the representation of grammatical metaphors. The Chinese sentence patterns are more fixed and less flexible so that there are not many applications of GM on sentential level realized by transference of process types. However, the large amount of nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization explains the phenomenon that Chinese sentences carry a higher degree of lexical density. Chinese and American state leaders'discourses share great similarity on the application of metaphors of modality and metaphors of mood, which proves again that the same genre, style and purposes will lead to the same features on linguistic and grammatical levels.Chapter five explores the applications of GM in English-Chinese translation. By careful study of the Chinese translation of the American state leaders'discourses, it is found that different strategies are applied when translating different realizations of grammatical metaphors. As to the translation of the English GM resulting from the transference of process types, the congruent Chinese realizations come to be our first choice for most cases because it is quite difficult to find the corresponding Chinese sentences that carry the same transitivity metaphors. While the English nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization can often find their corresponding Chinese equivalents that are metaphorized in the same way. The discussion about translation may not be comprehensive enough but it is believed that the results may give the translators some clues on the translation of such discourses.Chapter six, the concluding part of the thesis, summarizes our findings and points out the limitations of the research and suggested areas for future study.The significance of this thesis lies in that it is the first contrastive study of the Grammatical Metaphor in American and Chinese state leaders'discourses. It offers a new insight into the contrastive analysis of this text type. What's more, the translation of English metaphorical sentences in American state leaders'discourses into Chinese has been discussed for the first time. However, due to the implicitness of the division between"congruent"and"metaphorical"and the limited collection of the sample materials, it is unavoidable that the statistic data cannot be calculated with 100% accuracy though it can still show us the tendency. All the conclusions and implications in the present study await the other scholars'test with more scientific research methods.