A Study Of Function And Distribution Of Grammatical Metaphor

The theory of grammatical metaphor was put forward by Halliday. It has become ahot topic for discourse analysis. The thesis is based on the systemic functional linguisticswhich takes the English news reports and academic articles as language material. Theauthor analyzes the distribution of grammatical metaphors and its functions in the twogenres. Firstly, the author divides the move structure for the two genres according to thegenre analysis model that put forward by Swales. The division of move structure can beused to compare and analyze the genres features. Secondly, the comparative analysis ofgrammatical metaphors in the corresponding move of the two genres is helpful forrecognizing the different genre features. Finally, the analysis for acquiring the similaritiesand differences results of the functions of grammatical metaphors within the two genresand its function in realizing the genre features.The thesis adopts two corpora for the qualitative and quantitative analysis: Englishnews reports and English academic articles corpus. The Concord function of Wordsmith isused to get the distribution of grammatical metaphors within the two corpora in order tostudy the genre features of grammatical metaphor. The author compares and analyzes thedistribution of grammatical metaphors in the two corresponding move structure within thetwo genres: that is Move1: Introducing a topic, Move2: Extension of news report; Move1: Introduction, Move2: Main body of academic article. The study result shows that thefrequencies of grammatical metaphors in the corresponding move structure within the twogenres are same as follows:1. The frequencies of ideational grammatical metaphor inacademic article is more than it in English news reports. Through nominalization, thenumber of sentence is reduced and the authority of academic article is increased.Meanwhile, nominalization could enrich the information capacity of sentences andlanguage density, thus the syntactic structure is simplified. It accords with the succinctstyle of academic article.2. The amount of ideational grammatical metaphor in the newsreport is more than it in the academic article. That is because the modality systemexpresses the attitude of speaker towards the proposition. The largely used of modalitysystem in the news report indicates the subjective orientation of writer towards theproposition, the personal views are concealed by the use of modality system, the objectivity is reflected in news report.3. The textual grammatical metaphor plays adominant role in news report rather than it in the academic article. Textual grammaticalmetaphor makes the news report more coherent and nicely ordered. News report shouldtake the smallest space to provide the most information due to the limitation of time andspace.This study would explore how the grammatical metaphor functions in buildingEnglish news report and academic article. The study results provide valuable consultingfor reading and writing ability for news report and academic article.