| The usage of metaphor has a long history. In the west, it can date back to the time of Aristotle. From the work Metaphors we live by written by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, metaphor is no longer treated as a linguistic phenomenon, but a part of cognitive mechanism and used widely in various linguistic varieties. Metaphors can also be seen in every aspect of our life. We can see metaphor has become a linguistic phenomenon that can not be ignored. Many researchers have done research on metaphor from different aspects, among which there are many theses and works on metaphor in political, scientific, advertising and military areas. All of the work has done great contribution to people's perception of metaphor. Economic news, as an important branch, plays an important part in people's life in that economical policies, economical change and reform even the international economic state influence a modern man's life. newspaper, as an indispensable channel from which we get information, the role of which can not be replaced. However, exploration for metaphors in English economic news is not enough.The present research studies the way metaphor (herein after referred to as GM)is used in English economic news. It allows reporters to strategically distance themselves from the information they are providing and leave listeners the impression that the news is objective as well as reliable. The study focuses on ideational metaphors, interpersonal metaphors and their respective realizations in English economic news as well as their respective functions and how they work together to create the impression of objectivity,timeliness, novelty etc.The theory of Functional Grammatical Metaphor is used to analyze the corpus of 30 pieces of economic news that are selected from May to September, 2009 in Financial Times, New York Times and Time. Through the analysis and statistics, the author has got the following findings:1) Both ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors exist in English economic news. 2) Ideational metaphors are more frequently used. At the level of selection of process type, ideational metaphors occur mostly in the course of transference between the material process and other types of processes. But the majority of ideational metaphors are result of configuration of transitivity functions. 3) Nominalization is the most obvious realization of ideational metaphors in English economic news and most helpful to make news discourse reliable and believable. 4) As for interpersonal metaphors, there are nearly no metaphors of mood, because the main function of news is to give information to readers through statement. In all, interpersonal metaphors are not so popular in English economic news, since interpersonal metaphors are about the interaction that should be minimized in the news reports.The first chapter of the thesis is literature review. In this chapter, the author briefly introduces to us the development of metaphor and research achievements of early researchers and learners. And the author recalls the early development of research on English economic news. The relationship between the Systemic-functional grammar and metaphors in English economic news is pointed out. Compared with other theories, Systemic-functional grammar which is to be used to analyse metaphor in the data is advantageous. All of those lay a good foundation for the data analysis in chapter three. Chapter two is about theoretical framework. First is the detailed description of the Systemic-functional grammar, then stylistic features of English economic news with a view to pointing reasons why metaphors are used in English economic news. And all the features are determined by its function the news has to assume. The classification of metaphors from systemic-functional grammar is presented in this chapter: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. And interpersonal metaphor can be further divided into mood metaphor and modality metaphor. Chapter three is data analysis part. The author analyses the data from Halliday's systemic-functional grammar perspective. And analysis is divided into ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. Through the analysis, we can see that ideational metaphors takes up an absolutely larger part of the metaphors while interpersonal metaphors nearly do not appear in the data.. Ideational metaphors are mostly realized through nominalization. This justifies the functions of English economic news which are used to provide information for the readers or listeners. At the same time, news tries to avoid interacting with its audience, which explains the merely appearance of the interpersonal metaphor.In a word, Halliday's way of dealing metaphors from the systemic-functional grammar perspective is a milestone in the history of metaphor research. From which we can better understand the features of metaphors and the characteristics of English economic news. The research is also of significant importance and great help for the research and understanding of economic and scientific language, even for the whole language. |
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