An Exploration Of Grammatical Metaphors In Different Written Genres

Grammatical metaphor has become an important research topic in recent decades. Relevant studies by systemic-functionalists with Halliday being the representative are fruitful in particular. However the current studies on grammatical metaphors in genres are limited to one or two certain genres and the exploration into the relationship between grammatical metaphors and written genres has not been reported by far.This thesis attempts to take four written genres, i.e. scientific text, news, business letter and essay as examples and make an exploration into the grammatical metaphors in them. After a brief review of the background information including the studies of metaphor, grammatical metaphor and genres, quantitative analyses of grammatical metaphors in four genres are conducted first to get statistics of occurrences and percentages of grammatical metaphors in each genre. Then, detailed analyses of ideational grammatical metaphors and interpersonal grammatical metaphors in four genres are made, in which the statistics and sample analyses are presented. Finally, a comparative study of the occurrence and percentage of every grammatical metaphor type in these four genres is conducted, in which the differences of grammatical metaphors in the four written genres are summarized and the reasons for the differences are discussed so as to reveal the relationship between grammatical metaphor and written genre.The main findings of this research are that the occurrences and percentages of every type of grammatical metaphor are determined by the features of that genre. Meanwhile, the use of grammatical metaphors contributes to construct the genre features and finally help to achieve the communicative functions of that genre. Hopefully, this research can provide a new angle of view in genre analysis, and broaden the study scope of grammatical metaphor.