A Study Of Interpersonal Metaphors In The Film The Remains Of The Day

Metaphor is one of the most common linguistic phenomena.The use of metaphor reveals important information of the speaker,such as character,identity,social status,profession,attitude and emotion.The study of metaphor helps to explore the subaudition of the discourse and contributes significantly to understanding interpersonal relations,alleviating contradictions,and enhancing cooperation;meanwhile it is made possible to further explore the mental activity of humans,the social environment and cultural information.The British contemporary linguist M.A.K.Halliday has made great contributions in analyzing metaphors from grammatical level.Grammatical metaphor is no longer the same with traditional definitions of metaphors in the systemic functional grammar system,with realization forms of both metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality.The phenomenon of interpersonal metaphor takes place during interpersonal communication,giving expression to interpersonal significance.For decades many researchers have conducted study in depth on various categories of discourses including news manuscripts,government reports,technical advertisements,presidential address etc.,whereas there are very few study of interpersonal functions on the dialogues of characters in English films.The English classic film The Remains of the Day is chosen to be the background reference of this study and the script of the film is the text in discussion.With the guidance of M.A.K.Halliday's functional grammar theory and interpersonal metaphor theory,the author transcribes all the dialogues in the film,marking and selecting all the interpersonal metaphor phenomena in 20 sample dialogues with the help of quantitative and qualitative research methods.It is discovered that interpersonal metaphors have occurred 66 times and function distinctively in the dialogues.Through a detailed exploration on the forms of realization and communicating functions,the author comes to conclusion that the interpersonal metaphors immensely exist in the discourses and they reveal greatly the interpersonal relations.Metaphors of mood facilitate in proposing suggestions and advancing intimacy while metaphors of modality mainly function in adjusting and changing the tendency between subjectivity and objectivity.Through analyzing the statistics of occurrence and frequency of interpersonal metaphors,the author also discovers that metaphors of modality outnumber metaphors of mood in this film.It indicates that the characters tend to employ more metaphors of modality to suit their specific communicative purposes,adjusting between subjectivity and objectivity to highlight attitudes and emotions,or to avoid responsibility and involvement.Last but not least,with the guidance of M.A.K.Halliday's interpersonal metaphor theory,the exploration of the forms and functions of interpersonal metaphor in this film provides important reference to unscramble the speakers' intentions,attitudes and relations,proposes a brand new theoretical perspective for film discourse analysis and offers first-hand material in discussing discourse functions of interpersonal metaphors in films.