| Grammatical metaphor (GM) is an important means for human beings to understand theworld. Halliday(1985) pointed out that grammatical metaphor isn’t one word to replace anotherword, but a grammatical category or grammatical structure to replace another grammaticalcategory or grammatical structure. Hallidy comprehensively explores the nature, types,functions, forms of realization and operating mechanism of grammatical metaphor. InHalliday’s view, grammatical metaphor can be divided ideational GM and interpersonal GMwhich explain how the functions of grammatical metaphor are realized and at the same timeestablish social relations between texts and social phenomena. Ideational grammaticalmetaphor is the metaphorical expression of the processes in the transitivity system. Specifically,ideational grammatical metaphor is realized through the transferences among six processes inthe transitivity system and nominalization, etc. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor means astrand of meanings running throughout the text that express the writer’s relationship with thereaders or speakers (Halliday,2000). It is embodied mainly by metaphor of mood andmodality.There must be some reasons for the wide use of this linguistic phenomenon: grammaticalmetaphor. It is either because users intentionally employ it or have something awkward to sayfrankly. In fact, language users euphemistically express their true intentions by means ofgrammatical metaphor. Therefore, critical analysis of grammatical metaphor can help readersto better understand the underlying message between the lines. Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) is a theory mainly used to reveal the relationship among language, power and ideologythrough analyzing the forms of language. According to this theory, ideology and language areclosely related while language is an important way to study ideology. Language is only thetextual form and ideology is the textual content. The relation between language and ideologyexists both in the lexical and syntactic structure. Critical Discourse Analysis is just to analyzeand reveal the hidden ideology in the discourse.News report is the so-called “mass-media discourse”. What makes it different from theface-to-face communication is its unidirectional feature. In news reports, the reporter andreader are totally separated. The dominant position is occupied by the former, who decideswhat to say and how to say. Because of this feature, the news reports are never absolutelyobjective and loaded with strong ideology. Due to the effects of specific interest group, ideology, political system and other factors, western media intentionally use a large number ofgrammatical metaphors in the reports on Chinese problems to achieve specific propagandapurposes.Taking a perspective Critical Discourse Analysis, according to Halliday’s GM theory, thisthesis quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes ideational and international GM phenomenon inthe10selected news reports on10-year anniversary of China’s access to the WTO in foreignperiodicals like The New York Times, Washington Post and The Economist. The quantitativeanalysis leads to a conclusion that in ideational grammatical metaphor, nominalization and thetransferences between relational and material processes occur more frequently; in interpersonalgrammatical metaphor, explicit subjective expressions appear more. In the subsequentqualitative analysis, the author analyzes the most-frequently-used grammatical metaphors indetail and their ideological functions based on critical discourse analysis and endeavors toexpose the true intentions and underlying ideological factors.As everyone knows, since its accession to the WTO, China has fully performed thecommitments made before entering the WTO and canceled all quotas, permits, and othernon-tariff measures that are incompatible with WTO rules, in the meanwhile, it has fullyliberalized foreign-trade operation right and lowered entry threshold for foreign investment.The great contribution China has made for its rapid economic development and the world’seconomic and trade prosperity has received wide recognition and praise all over the world.Unfortunately, some people in the western countries adhering to the cold war mentality,brazenly blame China for its economic policies and even political system so as to transfer theirdomestic pressure. This undoubtedly has its profound ideological roots.Based on the analysis of typical examples in the ten selected foreign news reports, it isconcluded that functions of grammatical metaphor in terms of ideology have three kinds:derogatory, persuasive and inductive functions. Under the cover of objectivity and fairness,foreign news reports use grammatical metaphor in different levels in order to hide their trueintentions and ideology. Therefore, when reading foreign periodicals, the readers must cultivatetheir critical reading consciousness and see clearly the essence through the phenomenon. Indoing so, they are not influenced by foreign ideology. |
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