A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English News Leads: A Systemic Functional Approach

Located in the front of the news, the English news lead is the soul of the whole report, to which modern readers always turn so as to obtain the main information or decide whether to read further with the pace of life being accelerated. Due to the distinctly important status, the news lead has undergone numerous studies, whereas few researchers have conducted research on grammatical metaphor (GM hereafter) in news leads from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL hereafter).This thesis takes the perspective of SFL to study GMs in news leads. Specifically, this thesis mainly adopts the qualitative method to explore the realization forms and effects of GMs in the news leads collected by observation from the news in the website www.un.org of the first half of 2015, aiming to reveal how the applications of different GMs facilitate the construction of news leads. As the news lead is short in length and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) still have reservation about textual GM, this study focuses on ideational GM and interpersonal GM.The major findings of this research are as follows. As for ideational GM, through metaphorizing Material Process as the other two major Processes, metaphor of transitivity enables the news lead to give prominence to the information focus of the report. Besides, metaphorical Participant assumes the most responsibility of summarizing the main content of whole report in the news lead and metaphorical Process makes the language of news lead appear more reliable to attract readers to read more. In interpersonal GM, metaphor of Mood evokes readers’ interest in the main body of the report by metaphorizing declarative Mood, and metaphor of Modality as well as evaluative metaphor can guide public opinion with explicit objective forms. Actually, the same effect may be achieved by different GMs.In addition, this study also finds that different GMs can either exist independently or interact and cooperate with each other. The interactions exist both within ideational GM and between ideational GM and interpersonal GM. The discussion indicates that interaction within ideational GM basically refers to the cooperation between metaphorical Participant and metaphor of transitivity or metaphorical Process while interaction between ideational GM and interpersonal GM basically refers to the cooperation between metaphorical Participant or metaphorical Process and metaphor of Modality.Through studying GMs in news leads, this thesis not only provides a possible while novel interpretation to the reading of news leads but also hopes that, on the basis of language study, it can urge readers to have positive thinking and correct understanding during reading process.