An Analysis Of Grammatical Metaphor In English News Discourse

Metaphor is a common language phenomenon in human life, the study of whichcan date back to ancient Greece. In recent years, scholars from different fields havedevoted efforts to the study from diverse perspectives. These studies have one thing incommon—mainly focusing on the lexical and rhetorical aspects of metaphor, althoughthey are carried out by different research methods. The study of metaphor has beenexpanded to the lexico-grammatical level since M.A.K Halliday put forward the theoryof Systematic Functional Linguistics. Metaphor is termed GM (grammatical metaphor)against this framework. Halliday holds that GM is in essence the various expressions ofthe same meaning, which involves the transference from one kind of grammatical formto another. He divides GM into two types: ideational GM and interpersonal GM. Havingexplored certain scientific texts, he also concludes that all adult discourses arecharacterized by metaphorical expressions.This paper is designed to explore the phenomenon of GM through the analysis ofconcrete examples from the latest news discourses published in best-selling Englishnewspapers, magazines and authoritative news reports. In order to achieve this goal, thepaper is both theoretically and practically oriented. From the theoretical perspective, itintroduces the notion of GM, its classification and realization forms. Seeing from apractical angle, the paper focuses on how GMs are distributed in news discourses andwhat specific functions they perform. This thesis not only describes the ideational GMand interpersonal GM proposed by Halliday, but verifies the textual GM advocated by functional linguist Martin as well. Moreover, based on Martin’s study, the author alsoreclassifies the types of textual GM into metaphorical cohesive device, metaphoricalinformation structure and metaphorical theme.The following findings can be obtained from this paper. Firstly, three types of GM,namely ideational GM, interpersonal GM and textual GM, prevail in news discourses.Secondly, nominalization is the main realization form of ideational GM; the statementrealized by the interrogative mood is the major realization form of metaphor of moodand the explicitly subjective expression is the main realization form of metaphor ofmodality; textual GM is mainly realized by metaphorical cohesive devices andmetaphorical theme-rheme structure. Lastly, each type of GMs is characterized for theirparticular function in a text: ideational GM facilitates the reconstruction of experienceand helps to achieve the effect of objectivity and brevity; interpersonal GM promotesthe interaction between news discourse writers and readers; textual GM enables writersto organize English news discourses effectively and cohesively. In addition, three typesof GMs interact with each other in one way or another to serve for the whole text.