A Functional Analysis Of Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor In American Presidents' Inaugural Addresses

In the light of Halliday?s view of interpersonal grammatical metaphor, the author of this thesis selects the American presidents? inaugural addresses as the object of this study, attempting to interpret that interpersonal grammatical metaphor not only is a linguistic feature of American presidents? inaugural addresses, but also plays a significant role in the achievement of the speech purposes through analyzing the realization forms and functions of interpersonal grammatical metaphor.Halliday is considered to be the first one to make a systemic research on grammatical metaphor. The construction of his systemic-functional grammar theory symbolizes the real beginning of grammatical metaphor study. Although Halliday has not given us a clear definition of grammatical metaphor, his distinction between lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor, and his illustration of congruent and incongruent forms help us come to an agreement that grammatical metaphor is an incongruent realization or a variant of meaning involving mutual transference of grammatical forms. So the variation in the expression of interpersonal meaning is interpersonal grammatical metaphor. According to the realization forms of the three metafunctions of language, interpersonal metafunction is mainly realized by the modality system and the mood system. Therefore, interpersonal grammatical metaphor can be classified into metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood. Through statistics, the author finds that interpersonal grammatical metaphor is amply employed in American presidents? inaugural addresses. And the functional analysis reveals the selection basis of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in American presidents? inaugural addresses, fully elaborating how language forms are combined with language functions to achieve various communicative purposes.A functional analysis of interpersonal grammatical metaphor can provide a new perspective for various discourse analyses, meanwhile the study of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in discourse will be helpful to understand and analyze discourse. And it can also benefit English learners in better understanding and employing target language and thus improving the communicative competence more effectively.