A Study Of The Pragmatic Strategy Of Grammatical Metaphor In Film Discourse

According to Ortony, contemporary metaphor theories can be roughly dividedinto two camps: nonconsructivism and constructivism camps. However, theories fromthe two camps mainly lay their emphases on lexical metaphors. Under suchcircumstances, Halliday first puts forward the concept of grammatical metaphor in thelast chapter of his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar. He believes thatmetaphor not only exists at lexical level, but also often happens at grammatical level.The proposal of grammatical metaphor not only has widened the scope of metaphorstudy, but also has complemented metaphor study to some extent. After more thantwenty years of development of grammatical metaphor theory, an increasing numberof scholars at home and abroad apply it into analyses of various discourses such asnews, scientific discourses, poetry, novels, advertisements, film discourses and so on.As Professor Zhu Yongsheng says, Halliday s linguistic theories have dense hue ofpragmatics because of sociologist Bernstein s strong influence. Of course, his theoryof grammatical metaphor is not exceptional. Pragmatic strategy in linguistics refers toall kinds of linguistic means which are utilized by language users to achievecommunicative purposes. Linguisticians usually combine pragmatic strategies withtheories of pragmatics for study such as pragmatic strategies and cooperative principletheory, pragmatic strategies and speech act theory, pragmatic strategies and politenessprinciple theory. Under the guidance of these theories of pragmatics, scholars oftenmaintain that conversational implicatures, pragmatic vagueness and politenessstrategies can all be treated as pragmatic strategies.Few scholars have studied pragmatic and social effects of grammaticalmetaphors in film discourse. This paper aims to discuss some pragmatic and socialeffects revealed by grammatical metaphors in film discourse. In previous studies,scholars mainly approach pragmatic strategies from the perspectives of cooperativeprinciple theory, speech act theory, and politeness principle theory, however, thispaper will attempt to study grammatical metaphor as a pragmatic strategy in film discourse. The reason why the author chooses film discourse as the subject of studyinstead of other discourses is that she believes that film discourse is close to the realcontext. Through an analysis of grammatical metaphors used by characters in films,readers can get a glimpse of grammatical metaphors used by people in daily life.Through an analysis of grammatical metaphors used by characters in filmdiscourse, the findings can be concluded as follows: Firstly, speakers deliberatelychoose the metaphorical form instead of the congruent form for some specificpurposes or pragmatic effects, so the pragmatic effects of humor, satire and politenesscan be produced by these metaphorical forms that they choose. Secondly, some socialeffects like the personalities, the degrees of education, the distance of social status ofspeakers and the relationships between them will all be fully revealed by grammaticalmetaphors they use. Thirdly, grammatical metaphor, especially interpersonalgrammatical metaphor, contains a powerful interpersonal function, which can also betreated as a kind of pragmatic strategy to achieve the communicative goal. From thecurrent researches, the studies of grammatical metaphor as the pragmatic strategy arestill rare, so the study of this paper which treats grammatical metaphor as thepragmatic strategy would be of some help for pragmatic strategy studies.