| Grammatical metaphor is put forward by Halliday firstly in the book An Introduction to FunctionalGrammar which was published in1985. In his opinion, the grammatical metaphor is a metaphoricalexpression of a meaning thorough a lexicogrammatical form, which originally expresses a congruentmeaning. Halliday divides the grammatical metaphor into ideational grammatical metaphor andinterpersonal grammatical metaphor. Ideational grammatical metaphor is the variations in the process ofselecting in the transitivity system, and nominalization is the main form of ideational grammatical metaphor.As for interpersonal grammatical metaphor, it includes metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood.Afterwards, Halliday reclassifies the ideational grammatical metaphor into13types when he decodes thescience and technology texts, which develops the theory of the grammatical metaphor and makes the theorymore perfect.Since the birth of the grammatical metaphor, it is mainly adopted to analyze the science andtechnology texts and advertisement texts. However, little study has been done on political news. Therefore,15English political news in May2011from the BBC website are collected as the data and are analyzed inthis study. On the basis of these data, this research attempts to answer the following questions.(1) Whatfeatures does the BBC English political news have concerning the grammatical metaphor?(2) How doesthe grammatical metaphor cause rank shifts in the BBC English political news?(3) What functions doesthe grammatical metaphor have in the BBC English political news?This study has the following findings.(1) The grammatical metaphor is universal in the BBC Englishpolitical news. The ideational grammatical metaphor is the main form of the grammatical metaphor, andnominalization is the main realization of the ideational grammatical metaphor. However, the interpersonalgrammatical metaphor is scarcely adopted in the BBC English political news.(2) Rank shifts occurfrequently together with the grammatical metaphor, and the congruent form is downgrading during themetaphorical process.(3)The grammatical metaphor plays an important role in information condensed,reshaping the experience of human being, and the objective of the BBC English political news.The thesis includes five parts as follows: Chapter One presents the introduction to the present research. It includes the research background, theresearch objectives, and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two offers the literature review about the grammatical metaphor, including Halliday’s theoryand the theories proposed by other scholars both at home and abroad. The grammatical metaphor in scienceand technology texts and advertisement texts are presented in this part as well.Chapter Three introduces the research design. It includes the research questions, data collection,research methodology and procedure, and the criteria of identification of the grammatical metaphor is alsocovered in the Chapter.Chapter Four is the core part of the research which focuses principally upon the data analysis anddiscussion. Firstly, through the theory adopted in this research, the grammatical metaphors are identifiedand classified. Then, rank shifts caused by the grammatical metaphor are analyzed in detail. Finally, threefunctions that grammatical metaphor has in the political news are discussed in this part.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the study. It presents the major findings of the research, thelimitations and the significance of the research, and suggestions for further studies are also covered in thisChapter.In conclusion, the grammatical metaphor is universal in the BBC English political news, which canhelp the journalist to convey more information in the limited space and make the news more objective. Thestudy of grammatical metaphor provides a new way to analyze the BBC English political news. |
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