A Contrastive Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And American English Newspaper Editorial

The study of metaphor has a long history, whose origin can be traced back to the rhetorical studies in ancient Greece to Aristotle's credit. As metaphor is a very pervasive language phenomenon in our daily life, therefore, various scholars have never stopped the studies of metaphor. The traditional studies in metaphor seemed too simple, which mainly investigated metaphor from the lexical and rhetorical perspectives. However, the 20th century saw a rapid change of metaphor research which has become the multidisciplinary research.In early 1980s, Halliday put forward the theory of Grammatical Metaphor, which interpreted the function of GM which could reshape human experience, providing a new angle for metaphor research. At first, Halliday classified GM into two categories: ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor. According to this theory, he thought that nominalization was the most powerful means in the realization of ideational grammatical metaphor. Meanwhile he divided interpersonal grammatical metaphor into two types:metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood. Based on this theory, as to the science discourses, Halliday proposed the notion of grammatical metaphor syndrome and made a new classification of GM into 13 types.On the theoretical basis of Halliday's Grammatical Metaphor, this thesis conducts a statistical analysis of the frequency of grammatical metaphor in 20 editorials, which are respectively chosen from New York Times and China Daily at random. It tries to make a classification and a contrastive analysis of all the clauses which contain grammatical metaphors in the editorials. As a result, the contrastive analysis of American and Chinese English newspaper editorials explores the realization forms of GM in the two kinds of English newspaper editorials, and even tells the differences between them. Furthermore the thesis makes an in-depth study of the functions of GM.After the contrastive analysis of the GM phenomena in American and Chinese English newspaper editorials, this thesis finally achieves the following purposes:1) further understanding the differences of GM in American and Chinese English newspaper editorials; 2) coming to know the differences between Chinese and American journalists' ability in English; 3) guiding the readers to a better understanding of grammatical metaphor theory; 4) providing reference data for the courses of English newspaper reading and English writing in the university; 5) improving the readers' capacity for reading, understanding and writing articles like the editorial.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 briefly introduces research background, rationale, research questions, methodology and data collection, as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 makes a comprehensive survey of metaphor and GM in particular, moreover, offers a survey of studies of news discourse, especially the editorial, meanwhile, the thesis also gives a simple introduction of the relationship between GM and editorial. Chapter 3 introduces the grammatical metaphor theory and some related notions, and focuses on Halliday's opinions and theories of grammatical metaphor. Chapter 4 constitutes the central part of the thesis. In this chapter, an analysis of the twenty sample editorials is carried out from the perspective of grammatical metaphor followed by the statistics and findings. Then, it devotes to the contrastive analyses of the collected data, and discovers the differences and similarities of GM in Chinese and American English newspaper editorial. And the reasons and the functions of GM in Chinese and American English newspaper editorial are found. Chapter 5 serves as a concluding section of the whole thesis, at the same time, the limitations of the current study and the suggestions for further studies are concerned.