An Application Of Grammatical Metaphor Theory In Business English Writing

The concept “Grammatical Metaphor”(GM)was first put forward by Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985.According to Halliday(2000),the metaphorical expression is the characteristic of all adult discourses,and the only examples without metaphors are children's discourses.He believes that children's language development goes through three stages,and their language move from the grammar of written language to that of the technological language in the third stage,in this process,metaphorical language makes their language more formal and more "written".It is obvious that the use of grammatical metaphor is an important feature of written language.Since English has been taught as a second language in China,students always find it difficult to develop the habit of thinking and writing in English as native English speaker in that the absence of language environment restricts the opportunity for them to use English.Many surveys show that even though some traditional linguistic mistakes,such as spelling mistakes,subject-verb disagreement,temporal mixing have been rarely seen in the compositions of English majors,the lack of diversity and accuracy in making sentences leads to the monotony and dullness in content.It is hard for Chinese students to write as fluently and idiomatically as native English speakers.What's worse,some students even write with Chinese thinking mode,which leads to the imbalance between their writing performance(output)and language input.This may partly result from the lack of competence to apply grammatical metaphor in writing.Thus,the status quo of the use of grammatical metaphor in students' writing deserves to be studied and proper approaches need to be put forward to improve students' writing ability.In this thesis,the classification of Grammatical Metaphors(GM)by Halliday is employed to conduct a statistical analysis of GM in the selected 60 business reports respectively written by Chinese business English majors and native English speakers with the adoption of quantitative and qualitative methods,which probes into the following three research question,firstly,the frequency,realization and functions of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor in Chinese business English majors' business reports and native English speakers' business reports,and the major type of GM in business reports are figured out;secondly,the similarities and differences in terms of the usage of GM in Chinese business English majors' business reports and native English speakers' business reports are discussed in detail;lastly,problems concerning the use of GM that exist in business English majors' business English writing will be analyzed,and then the suggestions of adopting GM to improve business English majors' writing ability are provided.The findings of the analysis can be summarized as follows: firstly,abundant GMs are found both in Chinese business English majors' business reports and native English speakers' business reports,including ideational metaphors and interpersonal metaphors,and ideational metaphors are much more frequently used than interpersonal metaphors.Among thirteen types of ideational metaphor,the frequency the first,second,fifth,tenth,and thirteen type is much higher than the rest eight types.Thus,these five types of GM are regarded as the important feature of business English writing.And the frequency of nominalization ranks the highest.Therefore,nominalization is the main realization form of ideational GMs.Secondly,in terms of the frequency of the use of various types of GM,native English speakers are higher than Chinese business English majors,especially the second,fifth,tenth,and thirteen type of GM,which indicates that there exists a gap between Chinese business English majors and native English speakers in terms of business English writing.Lastly,the adoption of ideational GM in business English writing can simplify sentence patterns,and increase word density at same time,and enhance the objectivity and coherence of discourse.Besides,interpersonal GM,especially the GM of modality plays an important role in the objectivity and authoritativeness of articles.As it is concluded before,Chinese business English majors are far behind English native speakers in terms of the frequency of the use of various types of GM,that is to say,compared to the latter,the former has relatively low lexical density,objectivity and coherence in their writings.This is a problem that Chinese business English majors cannot ignore in their writings.In conclusion,grammatical metaphor is a common linguistic phenomenon in business English writing,and it plays an important role in the construe of discourse,the formation of linguistic features,and the promotion of business communication.The significance of this study consists in carrying out a statistical and contrastive analysis of the classification of grammatical metaphor by Halliday.In the meanwhile,through the contrastive quantitative and qualitative analysis of GM in two types of business reports,the thesis figures out the differences between Chinese business English majors and native English speakers,aiming at providing some writing strategies and gives guidance to business English majors.