A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor And Its Application On American Political News Discourse

Metaphor is a normal linguistic phenomenon and widely used in human daily life, but from Aristole's time to the present day, the studies of metaphor are mainly focused on lexical level. Halliday is the first linguist who makes systematic study on grammatical metaphor and gives it a good illustration in his own way of functional grammar approach. In his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985), Halliday first put forward the concept of GM, and classified grammatical metaphor into two categories: ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal one. Later, based on the concept of grammatical metaphor syndrome, Halliday proposed a new theoretical model of grammatical metaphor, in which he distinguishes 13 types, including all the phenomenon of"rank shifting". Halliday's reclassification not only widens the extension of the theory, but does great contribution to the modern study of metaphor. Besides explaining nature of metaphor, grammatical metaphor also reveals grammar how to reshape human experience and become meaning potential.Halliday(1994:342) claims that"metaphorical expressions are characteristic of all adult text". It is grammatical metaphor that represents the reconstruction of people's experience towards the outside world. Before writing, the author finds that only several papers have some study in this field. Therefore, we could employ Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory to analyze political news discourse. All the data is collected from New York Times. The approach adopted in this thesis is combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative one, so the analysis is objective. The author not only analyses the grammatical metaphor's function, but pointes out that grammatical metaphor is a method hiding ideology in political news discourse. In this thesis, besides the study is the complement to Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, it could guide people to have right way in reading news. Meanwhile, the study could contribute to English learning.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. Chapter 1 serves to a brief introduction to the general framework of the study and significance. Meanwhile, the author lists three questions which will discuss in this thesis. The next chapter is the review of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory, its latest development and relevant studies by other linguists. Then the author analyses the mainly characteristics of news discourse and introduces previous historical researches in this field in Chapter 3. It is the relative objectivity that makes the study of grammatical metaphor in political news discourse rational. Chapter 4 is devoted to analyzing the selected data. The author finds that Type 2 is most widely used in the data. Meanwhile, the thesis mainly analyzes four functions in the political news discourse: the reshaping human experience function, the discursive function, information condensed function and other minor functions. At last, the author finds that one of features of American news language is the widely use of stable nouns group, not the dynamic verbs. In Chapter 5, the author pointes out the implication of this study. The study of the application of grammatical metaphor theory in the data could guide people to have right way in reading news. Meanwhile, the study could contribute to English learning. And Chapter 6 is the conclusion. In this chapter, the author summarizes the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research mainly from the angle of culture.Analyzing the application of grammatical metaphor in political news discourse, the author summarizes its basic functions. To some extent, the study reveals ideology hidden in news objectivity. But as the academic development, the study of grammatical metaphor will broaden our visions and enable us to view our language through social, culture and psychological cognitive perspectives and so on. At last, the author hopes honestly to have some correction so that the study can be perfect.