| With the development of economic globalization, getting the information about theeconomy and trend of global economic development has become an indispensable part ofpeople’s lives. In recent years, linguistics and cognitive linguistics researchers haveobtained fruitful achievements in the field of metaphor research, which has paved the wayfor further study of GM (grammatical metaphor) in various discourses, particularly ineconomic news discourses.Based on Halliday’s theory of grammatical metaphor in systemic-functional grammar,the present study analyzes the English economic news discourse aiming to identify thelinguistic features of GM and explore the real attitudes hidden in this type of discourse.In order to guarantee the reliability and validity of the data analysis, the author selects10pieces of English economic news respectively reported in the year of2013from5authoritative English economic magazines and radio programs, i.e. VOA (Voice ofAmerica), The New York Times, The Economist, BBC News and CRI Online, totally50news discourses as the corpora sources. The total English words amount to23210and theaverage number of words is about460.The thesis adopts both the quantitative and qualitative methods and intends to answerthe following questions:1) Are GMs universal in English economic news discourse?2) What are the typical types of GMs used in English economic news discourse?3) What are the distribution and functions of different GMs in English economicnews discourse?Based on the statistical analysis of the frequency and the percentage of each type ofGMs, the research findings show that:1) Grammatical metaphors are indeed widespread in English economic newsdiscourse.2) Ideational metaphor is the main type of GMs used in economic news discoursewhile interpersonal metaphor is relatively few.3) Ideational metaphors mainly occur at the level in configuration of transitivityfunctions (including the mutual between and internal process) and in sequence ofgroup-phrase classes realized by the work of nominalization. Extensive use of ideationalmetaphors fully reflect the stylistic characteristic of English economic news; a small amount of mood and modality metaphors conceal the hidden language ideology in order toreflect the relative objectivity of news discourse.By means of decoding GMs in English economic news discourse, the subtlecharacteristics of English economic news discourses are revealed so that listeners orreaders can benefit from the analysis and get a deeper understanding of the economic newsdiscourse and the reporters’ intention as well. However, due to the immaturity ofgrammatical metaphor theory itself, theoretical study on the third type of Halliday’sgrammatical metaphor, namely textual metaphor and its function remains to be furtherexplored and perfected. |
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