A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English Public Service Advertisements On The Environmental Protection

The study of metaphor has a long history. Halliday, the systemic functional linguist, first puts forward the term "grammatical metaphor" in the year 1985 in his works:An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Halliday defines grammatical metaphor as "variation essentially in the grammatical forms", which has no direct relationship with the traditional study of metaphor. He proposes that grammatical metaphor can be classified into ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. This thesis tries to conduct a research of grammatical metaphor in English Public Service Advertisements on the environmental protection based on Halliday’s theory of grammatical metaphor. PSAs play an important role in improving the public’s awareness to protect the environment, which is of great significance to the environmental protection. This study aims to discuss the following questions:1. Is grammatical metaphor widely used in English PSAs on the environmental protection? If so, what is the general distribution of grammatical metaphor?2. What are the realization forms of grammatical metaphor?(1) What are the realization forms of ideational metaphor?(2) What are the realization forms of interpersonal metaphor?In order to answer the above questions, this thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the English PSAs on the environmental protection based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar.350 PSAs on the environmental protection from the Internet and journals are collected and then examined sentence by sentence. In order to explore the overall distribution of grammatical metaphor in English PSAs on the environmental protection, cases using ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor are annotated respectively. Then, the author of this thesis examines the realization forms of ideational metaphor, metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality. In the process of this study, some examples will be given to illustrate the language features of English PSAs on the environmental protection.The results show that a large number of metaphorical expressions exist in PSAs on the environmental protection. The frequency of ideational metaphor is a little bit higher than that of interpersonal metaphor, and the ideational metaphor is mainly realized by nominalization, adjectivalization and verbalization, among which nominalization is the most powerful one. For the interpersonal metaphor, the percentage of metaphor of mood is larger than that of metaphor of modality. Furthermore, the imperative mood and interrogative mood are both commonly employed, while the occurrence of subjective explicit orientation is almost the same as the objective explicit orientation.It is hoped that through this study, there will be a clear understanding of the use of grammatical metaphor in English PSAs on the environmental protection and the linguistic features are also presented clearly in these advertisement texts.Thus writers of advertisements will get smoother and more successful ways to convey the eco-friendly information to the public.