Grammatical Metaphors And Their Hidden Ideology:a Case Study Of The Speeches By The American Presidents At World Famous Universities

Grammatical Metaphor firstly put forward by Halliday is a quite common linguisticphenomenon, which not only endows the discourse with linguistic and stylistic features,but also reflects the speaker’s discourse purpose. Fairclough’s three-dimensional modelincluding description, interpretation and explanation provides a feasible analytical modelfor the present critical discourse analysis.The thesis tries to find out the ideology hidden in grammatical metaphors in thespeeches by American Presidents at world famous universities by the means ofFairclough’s three-dimensional model from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis.The research attempts to explain the feasibility of analyzing grammatical metaphors fromthe perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis and to help the addressees understand theunderlying nature of these speeches reflected in language and develop their criticallanguage awareness.The thesis, including introduction and conclusion, is divided into five parts. Theintroduction part mainly presents research background, significance of the study, researchquestions as well as the framework of the thesis. Chapter One is literature review andbriefly reviews the researches of domestic and overseas linguists on GrammaticalMetaphor, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and political speeches. Chapter Two is thetheoretical framework of the thesis. This chapter firstly elucidates Halliday’s GrammaticalMetaphor: ideational Grammatical Metaphor and interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor.Then, this chapter introduces some key concepts of CDA including language, power andideology. At last, this chapter expounds Fairclough’s three-dimensional model: description,interpretation and explanation. Chapter Three, the body part of the thesis, is case study.This chapter mainly makes a detailed analysis and discussion of the frequency andfunctions of grammatical metaphors in the selected speeches on the basis of data collection,and eventually explores the ideology hidden in the grammatical metaphors. The case study follows Fairclough’s three-dimensional model: on description stage, data collection andtype analysis are done; on interpretation stage, functions are analyzed; on explanation stage,ideology underlying in grammatical metaphors is explored. The last part of the thesis is aconclusion in which major findings are summarized and limitations of the thesis andsuggestions for further study are pointed out.The thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative methods. By means of quantitativemethod, the thesis collects data from30speeches by American Presidents at world famousuniversities in order to analyze frequency of some typical grammatical metaphors in thesespeeches; by means of qualitative method, the thesis analyzes types and functions ofgrammatical metaphors and explores the hidden ideology in them. The research shows that,in general, grammatical metaphors play important functions in highlighting importantpoints, achieving objectivity, conciseness, formality and authority, and winning theaddresses over, all of which help American Presidents successfully express their ideology.