On Realization Of Grammatical Metaphors In The Inaugural Addresses Of American Presidents

The inaugural addresses of American presidents are very important political discourses,which reflect the presidents' political attitudes towards events both abroad and at home.Whether the public accept and support the presidents' opinions or not depends greatly onpresidents' employment of language techniques. On the basis of theory of grammaticalmetaphors proposed by Halliday and textual metaphors by other scholars, this thesis willchoose ten inaugural addresses of American presidents as the objects of study. This paper willmake data description and statistical analysis, of grammatical metaphors, including textualmetaphor used in ten corpuses, aiming at finding out the frequencies of the use ofgrammatical metaphors, the realizations of grammatical metaphor, and the anticipativelanguage effect on public of grammatical metaphors used in the ten corpuses.Grammatical metaphor is proposed by Halliday based on three metafunctions of language.Halliday believes that there existed two kinds of realizations of language: congruent form andincongruent form, and the congruent realization is grammatical metaphor. He classifiedgrammatical metaphor into two parts: ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. Thelatter linguists, such as Thompson, Martin and Fan Wenfang, proposed textual metaphor, andalso made further classification. This paper mainly makes use of the theory of ideationalmetaphor and interpersonal metaphor proposed by Halliday, and the thematic equative andpredicated theme put up by Martin.It can be concluded that there is a highly use of ideational metaphor and interpersonalmetaphor in the ten corpuses. In the inaugural addresses of American presidents, theideational metaphor is mainly achieved through transference of processes, and theinterpersonal metaphor is realized through metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality,between which, there is much use of metaphor of modality which helps the presidents to statetheir political attitudes. However, there is little use of textual metaphor.The use of grammatical metaphors helps the speakers to express their opinions andattitudes better, and to achieve the anticipative effect on public. The analysis of the realizationand the function of grammatical metaphor used in inaugural addresses of American presidentswill contribute a lot to the enrichment of the theory and practice of Grammatical Metaphor.