A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Commencement Speeches

English public speeches has always been a heated topic among linguists.They occur everywhere,including the presidents’ inaugural speeches,celebrity speeches and students’ campus speeches.However,commencement speeches,which serve as a guidance to graduates,have been ignored to a large extent.So far,there have been a number of researches on presidents’ inaugural speeches in terms of interpersonal function since scholars mainly focus on the communicative purposes of these speeches.This paper takes the commencement speeches delivered at some famous universities as data and some quantitive studies in terms of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor will be conducted,aiming at revealing the development of GM in these speeches.In addition,this paper will also study the distribution of GM in terms of Hasan’s generic structure and move steps will also be conducted based on the collected data.Functional linguistics holds that ideational metaphor reflects ideational metafunction and interpersonal metaphors are one of the devices to realize interpersonal meaning.This paper gives analysis not only on the application of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor to commencement speeches,but also to the application of grammatical metaphor in the obligatory moves of speech discourse in light of Hasan’s generic structure.It is found that both ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor are widely used in commencement speeches.With the ideational metaphors,the transference to relational process is the most frequently used.With the interpersonal metaphors,metaphors of mood is the most frequently used.A study of GM distributed in different generic moves finds that ideational metaphors are mostly used in illustrating the topic and the interpersonal metaphors are mostly used in offering advice and calling for actions.The study not only helps to broaden the application of GM theory but also serves as a guidance to the drafting of speeches.