A Study Of Interpersonal Metaphors In Modern Family

Linguists Lakoff and Johnson point out in Metaphors We Live by that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life,not just in language but in thought and action.Our ordinary conceptual system,in terms of which we both think and act,is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.The study of metaphors began with the philosopher Aristotle,who made the study of metaphors quite systematic at that time.Since then,linguists from all over the world have focused primarily on lexical metaphors until Halliday in 1985 put metaphors on grammatical level in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar.Halliday pointed out that interpersonal grammatical metaphor is used in various interpersonal expressions to highlight interpersonal meaning.Halliday divides the metafunction of language into three categories:conceptual function,interpersonal function and textual function.Interpersonal function means that language can not only describe the speaker's personal experience,but also indicate the speaker's identity,status,attitude,motivation and speaker's inference,judgment and evaluation of things.That is,people use language to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships,and at the same time express their views on the real world and the inner world,thereby further influencing the behavior of others through language.People often utilize interpersonal metaphors to achieve the purpose mentioned before.Many linguists have done research based on the functions of interpersonal grammatical metaphors embodied in different discourses like news,political discourse,advertising slogan and poetry etc.However,there is not much research on interpersonal metaphor in the daily communication of American dramas.Interpersonal metaphor includes metaphors of modality and metaphors of mood.Metaphors of modality are divided into explicitly subjective metaphors and explicitly objective metaphors,which are mainly realized in the form of clauses.The effect of metaphors of modality is to emphasize or weaken the speaker's point of view and make it more acceptable to the listener.Metaphors of mood refers to the transference of one mood type to another.That means one mood type can be used to realize two or more speech functions metaphorically.For example,declarative mood can not only realize statement function congruently,but also realize speech functions of command or question metaphorically.The meaning delivered by metaphors of mood is the combination of several speech functions.This thesis uses the dialogue in the famous family sitcom Modern Family to conduct oral discourse analysis,and uses Halliday's interpersonal grammatical metaphor as the theoretical basis to analyze the dialogue in Modern Family.This thesis focuses on two issues:First,whether interpersonal metaphor is a common phenomenon in interpersonal communication;Second,what roles interpersonal metaphor play in interpersonal communication.Through the analysis of typical examples in Modern Family,it is found that interpersonal metaphor is widely used in daily conversations.People resort to metaphors of mood to achieve the transfer between different moods,effectively alleviate the tone of speech,make it more acceptable for the listener,and enhance the relationship between both sides,while metaphors of modality highlight speaker's point of view which may influence listener's opinions or behavior or make the subjective opinions objective and more acceptable to the hearer.The studies of interpersonal metaphor theory in interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationship maintenance further promote the vertical development of interpersonal metaphor theory.Through the analysis of the metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality in the dialogue in Modern Family,this paper can provide a new perspective for the study of American drama,which helps to deepen the audience's understanding of Modern Family and has certain guidance for people's daily communication.It can also provide useful reference for translation studies and comparative studies of American dramas.