Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Brexit From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

Brexit in 2016 shocks the world,which is a major event of world history.During the process of Brexit,news reports play a prominent role in affecting readers' judgements and attitudes.Meanwhile,studies on Brexit are numerous.Jin Ling(2016)discusses the reasons,influences and tendencies of the UK after Brexit.Adopting Halliday's three meta-functions,Wang Yuge and Sun Xin(2017)make a critical study on the news reports on Brexit from China Daily and The New York Times.Adam Cygan(2020)conducts a study on the De-Europeanisation of UK regulatory governance along with the future of UK-EU trade relationship.Li Jingkun(2020)explores the future of British political party after Brexit.Unlike the previous studies on Brexit,this thesis takes grammatical metaphor as an analytical tool to carry out a critical study on the news reports on Brexit,aiming to reveal the ideologies and British identity crises embedded in the news reports about Brexit.Grammatical metaphor is firstly proposed by Halliday(1985)in An Introduction to Functional Grammar.According to Halliday,there are three meta-functions in language,that is,ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Corresponding to these three meta-functions,Halliday(1985)put forwards ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor,and Martin(1992)comes up with textual grammatical metaphor.The comparative study between the congruent form and metaphorical form helps to explore the implicit ideologies and power relations in discourses.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the use of grammatical metaphors in news reports on Brexit.Of all the news media,The Times,The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph are regarded as the authoritative newspapers in the UK.Based on these,the thesis makes a critical discourse analysis from the perspective of grammatical metaphor on 40 news reports on Brexit selected from The Times,The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph,with a combination of qualitative methods and quantitative methods.These 40 news reports are ranged from 2016 to 2019.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ideologies and the identity crises hidden in the news reports on Brexit by resolving the following questions:(1)What are the general distributions of grammatical metaphors in the news reports on Brexit?(2)From the distributions of grammatical metaphors,what are the ideologies hidden in the news reports on Brexit?(3)From the distributions of grammatical metaphors,what are British identity crises in the news reports on Brexit?By conducting a critical study of the above three questions,the major findings of this thesis can be drawn as follows.As for the first questions,the proportion of the metaphorical form(with 49.2%)is nearly the same as the congruent form(with 50.8%),which is a testimony that reporters prefer to employ grammatical metaphors in news reports on Brexit.Of all the three grammatical metaphors,ideational grammatical metaphor accounts for the highest proportion(with 48.2%),interpersonal grammatical metaphor ranks the second place(with 29.9%)and textual grammatical metaphor ranks the third place(with 21.9%).Besides,this thesis explores the distributions of the sub-types of ideational grammatical metaphor,interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor respectively.Ideational grammatical metaphor consists of metaphor of transitivity and nominalization.The proportion of metaphor of transitivity(with 66.7%)is much higher than nominalization(with 66.7%),which shows that metaphor of transitivity plays a key role in ideational grammatical metaphor.Metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality constitute interpersonal grammatical metaphor,and metaphor of modality(with 64.7%)is more popular with the news reporters than metaphor of mood(with 35.3%).Metaphorical theme and metaphorical news compose textual grammatical metaphor,and metaphorical theme(with 24.2%)is less adopted than metaphorical news(with 75.9%).In a word,ideational grammatical metaphor,interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor are prevalent in the news reports on Brexit.In response to the second question,based on the distributions of three grammatical metaphors,this thesis makes a critical study on 40 news reports on Brexit.The distributions above are ideologically embedded.Considering ideational grammatical metaphor,transference in transitivity can change the process of the clause.By taking metaphor of transitivity,the implicit ideologies can be easily revealed.In metaphor of transitivity,different political parties have different attitudes towards Brexit,showing the divergent standpoints of the political parties.Nominalization can transfer the quality of verb and adjective,of which nominalization of verb(with 68.7%)overwhelms nominalization of adjective(with 31.3%),making the statements more reliable in the news reports on Brexit.Regarding interpersonal grammatical metaphor,metaphor of mood features in uncovering the implicit mood when communicating with others.There are six types of metaphor of mood in news reports,of which declarative function manifested by interrogative mood(with 44.3%)and imperative function manifested by declarative mood(with 36.4%)are the most popular ones.Declarative function manifested by interrogative mood stresses on the facts by questions,presenting reporters' ironic attitudes to British government,while imperative function manifested by declarative mood can implicitly express reporter's appealing intention to the readers.Explicit subjective(with 55.9%)and explicit objective(with 44.1%)are both outstanding in metaphor of modality.Explicit subjective helps to express the reporters' ideas by quoting the opinions of others,making the statements more reliable and authoritative.Explicit objective omits the real subject,making the statements objective,which shows the reporters' concern about Brexit.As for textual grammatical metaphor,thematic equative and predicated theme make up metaphorical theme.Thematic euqative(with 65.9%)stresses on the “Rheme”,which is used by the reporters to condemn the foreign capital forces in intervening the UK's politics.Predicated theme(with 34.1%)emphasizes the “Theme”,which is employed to highlight the Theme(also the subject)in hidden operation in Brexit,expressing reporter's criticism.Metaphorical news consists of marked news and condensed news.Marked news(with 30.4%)bring the New information to the fore,which is used to stress on the New element of the clause;while condensed news(with 69.6%)makes the statement more concise and coherent,which also draws attention to the focus of the last clause.To sum up,three grammatical metaphors all play a leading role in transmitting reporters' ideologies to the readers.In regard to the third question,the quantity of the identity crises in grammatical metaphor(with 833 instances)is up to 589 instances,indicating that British identity is at risk.According to the years of these reports,this thesis finds that British identity crisis can be divided into two types.One is the British identity crisis to European Union(mainly occurs in 2016-2017)and the other is British identity crisis to the UK(mainly occurs in 2018-2019).To be more specific,ideational grammatical metaphor takes up the greatest proportion(with 59.9%)in displaying British identity crisis to European Union.Metaphor of transitivity demonstrates that the debt crisis,high membership fees and Euroscepticism that lead to Brexit.Nominalization of verb shows that the immigration policy of European Union dissatisfies the UK.All in all,ideational grammatical metaphor is mainly ideologically embedded with British identity crisis to European Union.Interpersonal grammatical metaphor(with 42.5%)and textual grammatical metaphor(with 31.1%)both feature in presenting British identity crisis to the UK.Metaphor of mood shows that Northern Ireland is against Brexit.Same as metaphor of mood,metaphor of modality indicates that Scotland and Northern Ireland are in favor of independence.Therefore,British national identity is being challenged during the process of Brexit.Regarding textual grammatical metaphor,thematic equative proves the fact that the UK's economy is fluctuated with uncertainty,and predicated theme lays stress on the fact that social disruption is intensified.Metaphorical news emphasizes the key of the clause so as to manifest the bad impact of Brexit.In conclusion,interpersonal grammatical metaphor and textual grammatical metaphor both ideologically reflect British identity crisis to the UK.From the above discussions,three grammatical metaphors all play an essential part in revealing the implicit ideologies and British identity crises.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct a critical study on the grammatical metaphors in the news reports on Brexit.This thesis provides a new perspective for the research of Brexit.Meanwhile,it can improve readers' critical awareness as well as appealing them to pay attention to Brexit.