| This study focuses on the ideational grammatical metaphor (GM) in English political news discourse. It aims at revealing the ideational GM characteristics of political news discourse according to M.A.K. Halliday’s theory of systemic-functional grammar. It attempts to explain the ideational GM from the perspective of rankshift. M.A.K. Halliday has classified all the transitions in lexicogrammatical and semantical levels into thirteen types in his study in1998(See Appendix1), and these thirteen types have an effective influence in the process of rankshift.This thesis explores the ideational GM in English political news by applying both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The number and percentage of all types of ideational GM is calculated and presented in forms of tables in the first place, followed by detailed analysis of the figure and further explanation with examples. Finally, how ideational GM is realized in the downgrading of ranks will be illustrated, the functions of ideational GM in political news will be summarized as well.As to the distribution of the ideational GM types in political news discourse, adjectivisation and nominalization types rank the highest. Type13is the most frequently applied GM. This implicates that in formal discourse as political news, with the packing of information and reconstruing of structure, the congruent theme is always replaced by more important information. Types3,4,7and8are the least preferred metaphorical types, because compared with notional words, structural words are more fixed in political news discourse. Besides, compound words also contribute greatly to the package of information in political news.In the re-mapping between sequence and clause, GM of Type10is the most frequently, because in the process of downgrading from a clause nexus to a clause, the conjunctions between clauses are most likely to be changed into circumstances. Besides, using a prepositional group instead of a simple conjunction also makes the discourse more formal. In the rankshift from clause to group, the changing of verbs plays a vital role; they either become thinginess, or a modifier to a noun.From the functional view of ideational GM in English political news, this study summarizes four functions. That is, the function of information packaging, the function of discursiveness, the function of cohesiveness, and the function of objectivity. On the one hand, this study analyzes the GM features of political news discourse, and therefore reveals the characteristics of formal styles of language generally. On the other hand, it makes an attempt to do the discourse analysis from the perspective of rankshift, which will hopefully offer some new insights into this type of discourse. |
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