Grammatical Metaphor In English And Chinese Scientific News Discourse: A Contrastive Analysis

The significance of the grammatical metaphor theory to systemic-functionallinguistics as well as to metaphor studies has been generally acknowledged.According to Halliday (1985,1994), grammatical metaphor refers to the metaphoricalexpression of a meaning by means of a lexicogrammatical form, which originally isused to express a congruent meaning. Halliday holds that grammatical metaphor canbe divided into two kinds: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. Hallidaypoints out that nominalization is the most obvious form of grammatical metaphor,especially in scientific texts. Halliday's grammatical model does not include textualmetaphor, which was put forward by Martin in 1992.This thesis, by conducting a statistical analysis of grammatical metaphor in 20scientific news discourse which are chosen from English Digest or from the Internetsuch as www.reuters.com and www.people.com.cn, is intended, on the one hand, tolook for other realization forms of ideational grammatical metaphor besidesnominalization in both English and Chinese scientific news discourse and on the otherhand, to verify the correctness of Martin's claim about the existence of textualmetaphor.Studies show that ideational metaphor is the main type of grammatical metaphorand nominalization is the most important realization form of ideational metaphor.Textual metaphor is existent in both English and Chinese scientific news discourse,although it is not so apparent compared with nominalization, adjectivization orverbalization. Therefore, textual metaphor is one inseparable part of grammaticalmetaphor. Statistics also show that there does exist interpersonal metaphor in bothEnglish and Chinese scientific news discourse. This thesis also summarizes the majordifferences and the main functions of grammatical metaphor in English and Chinesescientific news discourse.The present thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter mainly focuses onthe origin, necessity and significance as well as objectives of the study. The secondchapter is literature review. In this chapter, some key terms of grammatical metaphor are presented and other relevant studies and researches are also elaborated on. Inaddition, the relationship between grammatical metaphor and scientific newsdiscourse is given. The third chapter mainly concerns the methodology, includingresearch questions, research design and data collection procedures. The fourth chapteris the core of this thesis, which focuses on the results of the statistical analysis. Inchapter five, the major findings and implications of the study are concluded and thelimitations of the study are pointed out and suggestions for further research areproposed.