A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese And American Commencement Speeches

A large number of studies have shown that grammatical metaphor can be used to analyze different kinds of discourses.However,the study of grammatical metaphor using commencement speeches as corpus is slightly weak.This article selects 10 commencement speeches from each of Chinese and American universities from 2018 to 2019 as data objects to study the similarities and differences in the types and distributions of grammatical metaphor in commencement speeches in different languages,and to explore the reasons for the similarities and differences.It specifically answers the following three questions:(1)How grammatical metaphor is realized in Chinese and American commencement speeches?(2)What are the similarities and differences of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and American commencement speeches?(3)What are the causes for the differences of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and American commencement speeches? The conclusions are as follows:(1)There are nominalization,verbalization,adjectivization,prepositionalization,metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality in the selected speeches.(2)The similarities and differences of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and American commencement speeches are specifically embodied in the followings aspects: In ideational grammatical metaphor,nominalization and adjectivization both account for a large proportion in Chinese and American commencement speeches.Nominalization occurs more frequently in American speeches than in Chinese speeches.The identification of grammatical metaphor in American speeches is mainly identified by the inflection of words and the suffixes of words,while the grammatical metaphor of Chinese speeches is mainly recognized by context.In interpersonal metaphor,the explicitly subjective modality and command realized by declarative mood are the main ways of realization in both speeches.American speeches tend to use modalization,high-value,and negative metaphor of modality,while Chinese speeches tend to use modulation,medium-value,and positive metaphor of modality.There are also obvious differences in the identification of explicitly subjective modality.American speeches are identified by projecting clauses,while Chinese speeches can only be identified by some specific phrase expressions.(3)The main reasons for the differences of grammatical metaphor in Chinese and American commencement speeches are that from the cultural context level,the United States is a low-context culture,while China is a high-context culture;from the cognitive level,American speakers more easily reconstrue processes as things in representing and communicating the experienced world;from the language level,compared with English,Chinese lacks morphological marks to give and carry some grammatical meaning.At the same time,there are differences in the locations of grammatical realization.It can be seen that grammatical metaphor has the functions of formality,conciseness,objectivity in the construction of discourse.If English grammatical metaphor can be correctly used,then the problem of inaccurate language usage in students' speeches will be effectively solved.