A Functional Study Of Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphor In British And American Leaders' Speeches

According to Halliday's study and definition on grammatical metaphor, the grammatical metaphor that expresses interpersonal meaning is referred to as interpersonal grammatical metaphor. In view of the fact that the realization of interpersonal function is achieved by modality and mood system, interpersonal grammatical metaphor can be classified into metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality. For a long time, the researchers and scholars have carried out lots of studies on ideational grammatical metaphor from different perspectives and in different genres. However, studies on interpersonal grammatical metaphor especially on its function are relatively few. With the development of mass media, political speech, as a kind of public speech, has become quite popular among the audience. In order to persuade the audience and achieve the purpose of his speech, the speaker often pays great attention to the use of language and makes various decorations and modifications. Since the employment of interpersonal grammatical metaphor can make the language more tactful and objective, it has become a commonly used device in speech. Based on Halliday's interpersonal grammatical metaphor theory, this thesis attempts to explore the various functions of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in state leaders' speeches, analyze the ways that the functions are realized and reveal how speakers make use of interpersonal grammatical metaphor to realize the effective interaction with the audience, to successfully transmit speech information and ideas, and to obtain the speech goals of persuading and appealing the audience.In this paper, 20 speeches delivered by British and American leaders are chosen as the research data, which are downloaded from the British and American government websites from January, 2014 to October, 2015. 10 speeches are selected from American President Obama's speech and 10 selected from British Prime Minister Cameron's speech. Based on the theory of interpersonal grammatical metaphor, the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis is adopted for the study. Through the quantitative analysis, the author calculates and analyzes the occurrence and frequency of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in the 20 speech samples; through qualitative analysis, the functions and effectiveness of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in political speeches are illustrated and discussed.By analysis and discussion, the findings of the study can be summarized as follows: Firstly, there are large amounts of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in the leaders' speech discourse. Whether through the use of mood or expression of modality, speakers always use metaphorical ways to pass certain purpose or intent in their speech. Secondly, the use of modality metaphor is more than that of metaphor of mood. And due to the formal and authoritative feature of political discourse, the transferences between the mood domains are relatively fewer than the transferences between the word groups and clauses in expressing modality. Thirdly, as to the metaphor of mood, the speaker uses lots of declarative mood and imperative mood. Large numbers of declarative mood are used to deliver demands and orders, which can shorten the distance between the speaker and the audience, more euphemistically transfer its claims and persuade the audience easily. In addition, by using the imperative mood to state facts, the content of the speech can be stressed and the audience's attention can be hold. While the small amount of interrogative mood used in speeches bears the function of textual cohesion, enabling the audience to have an overall understanding of the speech and making the speech text more cohesive. Finally, in the metaphor of modality, the speaker mainly conveys his personal beliefs and opinions through the explicit subjective. This type of metaphorical use, on one hand, can inspire the enthusiasm of audience; and on the other hand, it can effectively deliver the speakers' firm beliefs to influence the audience.It can be concluded that this research has further proved the feasibility and effectiveness of interpersonal grammatical metaphor theory in discourse analysis. Meanwhile, the study also provides a new perspective for functional analysis of grammatical metaphor. In practice, the study has provided a way to interpret and appreciate political speeches. And at the same time, this thesis can offer certain implications for the teaching of English reading and writing as well as speech genre studies.