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

The grammatical metaphor (GM) theory has already formed a scale and has generally been acknowledged. According to Halliday (1985,1994), GM refers to the metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexicogrammatical form, which originally is used to express a congruent meaning. Initially, Halliday classifies GM into two types:ideational GM and interpersonal GM. Later, Halliday proposes the notion of grammatical metaphor syndrome, and reclassifies GM into 13 types. Halliday points out that nominalizations is the most common form of GM, especially in scientific discourse. Halliday's grammatical mode does not include textual GM, which was put forward by Martin in 1992.Based on the framework of GM theory, this thesis, by conducting a statistical analysis of GM in 20 scientific news discourses about health technology which are chosen from www.reuters.com and www.xinhua.com, is intended. This contrastive analysis aims to explore the realization forms of GM, differences in Chinese and English scientific news discourse and the functions of GM in scientific discourse. On the one hand, this thesis is to verify the existence of interpersonal GM and textual GM in English and Chinese scientific news discourse. On the other hand, to look for the implications that GM theory can provide for the English learners.Analysis shows that ideational GM is the main type of GM and nominalization is the most important realization form of ideational GM. Both interpersonal GM and textual GM exist in English and Chinese scientific news discourse, and they are parts of GM theory; besides, there are more GMs in the Chinese scientific news discourse. This thesis also summarizes the major differences and the main functions of GM in English and Chinese scientific news discourse. The major differences lie in the occurrence of GM, inflectional forms and occurrence of interpersonal GM. The major function of GM involves that experience-reconstructing function, encapsulation, text expanding and cohesive text.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter mainly introduces the preliminary remarks, propose and significance of the study as well as the organization of this thesis. The second chapter is literature review. In this chapter, it mainly introduces Halliday's contribution to the development of GM theory, and his classification about GM. Other relevant studies and researches are also elaborated on. The third chapter, it mainly concerns the methodology; including research questions, data collection procedures and analysis method. First, calculate the numbers of clauses in English and Chinese scientific news discourse; Then find out the numbers of ideational GM, interpersonal GM and textual GM in each discourse; to cancel the influence of different length of discourse, the percentage of GMs will be calculated. Finally, it will be discussed based on the collected data. The forth chapter is the core of this thesis. Through data-based analysis, the author analyzes the listed questions in chapter three and gets the final results. In chapter five, it is about conclusion. In this chapter, the author points out the implications that GM provides for the English learners in reading, writing and translating. And the limitations and suggestions for further research are proposed.