A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor On English And Chinese Political Speech

Grammatical metaphor (GM) has found a wide application both home and abroad since its proposal. Based on its theory, this thesis, first gives a detailed classification and distribution of GM in English and Chinese political speech by means of qualitative and quantitative methods, and then explores their similarities and differences. It is intended to not only reveal functions of GM in English and Chinese political speech but also offer some instructions for the applications of GM in English-Chinese translation.The thesis chooses 5 English political speech discourses from the American government official website (http://www.whitehouse.gov) and 5 Chinese ones from the Chinese government official website (http://www.people.com) as samples. An analysis to them starts with the identification of GM in languages, their corresponding numbers and percentages, and a detailed comparison, then ends up with three major findings:First, GM can be found in both English and Chinese political speech. There are two kinds of them: ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphor, but the former occupies more important place.Second, the realization of ideational grammatical metaphor in English and Chinese political speech is related to the transitivity system (involving GM resulting from transference across different processes and within one process), nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization. Both English and Chinese discourses employ great similarities in the distribution of transitivity metaphorization. For one thing, the number of GM resulting from the transference from material to relational process is prominent in both languages, for another the number of GM resulting from transference within one process is much less than the number realized by transference across different processes.English discourses tend to have more GMs resulting from transitivity metaphorization while there are a large number of nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization in Chinese discourses.Third, there are two kinds of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in both discourses: metaphor of mood and that of modality. And metaphor of modality is in the majority. Many applications of modality of probability and obligation are found while there is no modality of usuality in both discourses.Reasons for the findings are explored in terms of the features of English and Chinese, and the features of speech genres. English sentences include more changes in sentence patterns and those different sentence patterns may express the same meaning, whereas Chinese sentences are more fixed and steady, involving less change in sentential structures. Moreover, Chinese political speeches are more formal and enjoy a higher degree of lexical density than English ones.As a good attempt in the contrastive study of GM in both English and Chinese political speech, these findings not only offer a new insight into the understanding and writing of such discourses, the translation of metaphorical sentences from English to Chinese, but also present the general features of political speech.