A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor Analysis In English And Chinese News Discourse

As one part of Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics, grammatical metaphor increasingly shows its importance. Halliday first mentioned the term "grammatical metaphor" in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985). He pointed out that:metaphoric phenomena are not confined to the lexical level; they also exist as the grammatical level, which is grammatical metaphor[1]. Then after that metaphor phenomenon is widely studied by a surge of scholars from home and abroad and grammatical metaphor is applied to various discourses, for example:scientific discourses, advertising discourses and political speeches, etc. but the research of grammatical metaphor on the news discourse has been analyzed scarcely.Therefore, the present study conducts analysis of grammatical metaphor as a frame with English and Chinese news discourse as data from quantitative and contrastive study approaches. The news is taken from Los Angeles Times of United States and People's Daily of China. This thesis is to demonstrate the universality of grammatical metaphor through quantitative approach and explore the similarities and differences in English and Chinese news discourse. Finally, it clarifies the five functions of grammatical metaphor, they are:indicating function, extending function, concentration function, excursive function and objectifying function. Based on the deep research on the news discourse within a framework of grammatical metaphor, the readers can learn the characteristic of the news discourse and better understand the nature of the news.