Objectivity In BBC Economic News-From The Perspective Of Functional Grammatical Metaphor

The present study reports on the way the grammatical metaphor (hereinafter referred to as GM) is used in BBC economic news, thus allowing reporters to strategically distance themselves from the information they are providing and leave listeners the impression that the news is objective as well as reliable. The study focuses on ideational metaphors, interpersonal metaphors and their respective realizations in BBC economic news as well as their respective functions and how they work together to create the impression of objectivity.The theory of Functional Grammatical Metaphor is used to analyze the corpus of 30 pieces of BBC economic news that are selected from January to May 2005. Through the analysis and statistics, the author has got the following findings: 1) Both ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors exist in BBC economic news. 2) Ideational metaphors seem to be much more frequently used. At the level of selection of process type, ideational metaphors occur mostly in the course of transference between the material process and other types of processes. But the majority of ideational metaphors result from the level of configuration of transitivity functions, with 50 out of 65 ideational GMs. 3) Nominalization is the major realization of ideational metaphors in BBC economic news and helps a lot to achieve objectivity in news discourse. 4) As for interpersonal metaphors, there are no metaphors of mood, because the news is supposed to give information by means of statement. And only two metaphors of modality occur in the corpus. In all, interpersonal metaphors are not so popular in BBC economic news, since interpersonal metaphors are about the interaction that should be minimized in the news reports.