Grammatical Metaphor In English News Discourse

In recent several decades, metaphor study has become a multi-discipline topic. Since 1960s, relevant studies by functionalists are fruitful in particular. Halliday laid the ground of the study of grammatical metaphor from the systemic-functional view. Yet, the research on functions of GM and applications of GM to a particular genre is rare except Halliday and Martin's nominalization in science text. And any systemic research of a particular grammatical phenomenon in news discourse is seldom found. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore GM in news discourse from a functional approach.The paper consists of six parts. The first part presents simple introductions to grammatical metaphor and news discourse. The second part explains theories on grammatical metaphor. The third part presents the classification and realization of grammatical metaphor from functional approach. The fourth part offers an illustration of characteristics of news discourse, and the purposes of news reports and editorials. The fifth part is the core of the study, which focuses its discussion on Grammatical Metaphor in News Reports and Editorials. Statistics are collected and compared in this part. The analysis in this thesis demonstrates that abundant grammatical metaphors do exist in news discourse. They mainly occur in the form of ideational metaphor at the level of configuration of transitivity functions and of sequence of group-phrase classes realized by the work of nominalization, which can help news discourses realize their purposes of objectivity and impartiality. The interpersonal grammatical metaphor is rare in the news reports, but is frequent in the editorials and plays a great role in helping editorials fulfill their communicative functions: persuasion and evaluation. The last part of the thesis is the concluding part. It states major findings of the present study, points out some limitations and suggestions for further explorations. The present study demonstrates the idea that systemic-functional grammar provides a multi-level and multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis. The application of GM theory in discourse analysis is still on its early stage, more attempts and further improvement are still wanted in the future.