An Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor Based On Voa News Discourse

Since 1960s, some linguists and philosophers have done a great number ofextensive researches on grammatical metaphor; especially the functional linguistswho were represented by Holliday have achieved plenty of abundant researchaccomplishments. One of the greatest achievements that they have got is grammaticalmetaphor. Grammatical metaphor consists of interpersonal grammatical metaphor,ideational grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor. However, mostlinguists tend to apply the theories of grammatical metaphor into researching andanalyzing the scientific texts rather than the news discourses. Based on the analysis ofEnglish news discourse, this thesis devotes itself to exploring grammatical metaphorin news discourse from a functional perspective.On the foundation of the theories of functional linguistics, the author randomlyselects fifteen VOA news discourses on the Internet. With the quantitative andqualitative methods, this thesis collects, analyzes and shows the numbers ofgrammatical metaphor (ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammaticalmetaphor and textual grammatical metaphor) that are used in the fifteen VOA newsdiscourses. Based on these data, the author analyzes grammatical metaphor, andmakes a further exploration on the functions of grammatical metaphor in newsdiscourse.There are five sections in this thesis. The first section is the introduction, whichmainly introduces the research background, research purpose and overall structure of this thesis. The second section is the literature review. In this part, the author explainsthe theories on grammatical metaphor, and shows some previous studies on newsdiscourse, which is the foundation of the present study. The third section mainly talksabout the research method that the author used in her study, her research questionsand research design. The fourth section is the main body of this thesis, which mainlytalks about the analysis of grammatical metaphor in fifteen VOA news discourses.Finally, the author concludes the whole paper in the last part of the thesis. In themeantime, she also points out the implications and limitations of the present study,and makes some suggestions for future research.