A Research On Grammatical Metaphor In BBC Environmental News Discourse

The studies on metaphor has been continuing for thousands years. Meantime, the multidimensional tendency with the junction of different subjects develops metaphor from simple figure of speech to cognitive mechanism. Following this tendency, Halliday put forward the conception of grammatical metaphor through theorizing the replacement and selection among different grammatical structures from the perspective of metaphor. Grammar is the generalization of experience, which means the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor reshapes our experience in some ways. To meet the spreading needs of particular information, different discourse possesses its own pattern of grammatical metaphor. Due to its discourse feature, news stories, as the typical public discourse, incline to use the grammatical structures which contribute to present message in a more objective way to guide the fair and authoritative orientation of experience. Recent years, there are full of contradictions between human being and environment. Hence, the social influence of environmental news reporting all kinds of environmental issues is growing dramatically. Based on the function of grammatical metaphor to reshape the experience, this thesis focuses on researching the grammatical metaphor in BBC environmental news.At first, this thesis explains the rationality of the phenomenon itself and the research of grammatical metaphor from the development of metaphorical research and the metaphorical nature of grammar, and then describes the three stages of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory chronologically: “1985/1994” model, “1996/1999” model and “2004/2014” model. Through discussing the “theory-practice-theory” relationship among them, this thesis chooses “1996/1999” model as the framework for analyzing. Later, the concept of deep ecology will be introduced to provide the philosophical basis for this thesis to analyzing grammatical metaphor in environmental news ecologically.Based on this, the thesis explores grammatical metaphor in BBC environmental news with quantitative and qualitative approach both. The account and percentage of each type of grammatical metaphor under “1996/1999” model covering 13 types has been presented firstly, which serves as a vertical distribution with the description of the general data. To present the individual distribution horizontally, the given types has been rearranged into three categories in terms of their grammatical function. This thesis proposes a new taxonomy: lower rank-shift and higher rank-shift to regroup grammatical metaphor on Halliday’s theoretical foundation, and analyzes each type in detail under this framework with typical examples. And then the function of grammatical metaphor in environmental news will be summarized under the framework of metafunction in systemic-functional grammar. At last, this thesis criticizes the reshaping function of grammatical metaphor on our environmental experience in terms of deep ecology.By studying, this thesis draws the following conclusions: 1. Grammatical metaphor in environmental news discourses shows obvious tendency of nominalization, and the particular types of grammatical metaphor realizing lower rank-shift put into use broadly for decreasing the number of clause effectively in order to meet the objective and compact needs of environmental news discourses. 2. From the perspective of register, the functions of grammatical metaphor in the environmental news discourses have been concluded: reshaping experience at the aspect of field, strengthening scientificity at the aspect of tenor, optimizing structure at the aspect of mode. 3. With grammatical metaphor, anthropocentrism, the hided ideology in the environmental new discourses, has been covered. However, grammatical metaphor, as the corollary of semogenesis, cannot be bypassed.On the one hand, this thesis explores the integral distribution and the applying feature of grammatical metaphor in environmental news in order to describe the pattern of grammatical metaphor in this register; on the other hand, the attempt analyzing the aim and the influence of grammatical metaphor reshaping our environmental experience from the perspective of deep ecology will develop the new perspective for the relative studies.