Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Metaphor as a rhetorical device has attracted great attention among scholars eversince the ancient times. From a review of the theories in western countries, the studies ofmetaphor can be divided into three periods of development, namely the rhetorical studies,the semantic studies and the multidisciplinary studies of metaphor. Based on previousstudies, Halliday’s GM (grammatical metaphor) theory was firstly proposed in 1985 whichwas regarded as an untraditional and new perspective from traditional theory. Throughoutthe history, scholars in western countries have put forward some metaphorical theoriessuch as the Comparative Theory, the Interaction Theory, and Conceptual Metaphor Theoryon which metaphor studies were chiefly conducted respectively. A review of such theoriesof metaphor and its representatives is helpful to present background of the study. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who put forward Comparative Theoryviewed metaphor as a linguist variability. In his two books: Poetry and Rhetoric, Aristotlemade a preliminary and basic study of metaphor. He took metaphor as the transference ofa word from thing to another, the transference being either from genus to species, or fromspecies to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy[1]. Though manylanguages’ thoughts were deeply affected by Aristotle’s theory for centuries, his concept ofmetaphor was actually and entirely related to lexical. In addition, Aristotle stressed that theuse of metaphor could only be limited in field of poetry which was also regarded as biased.Hawkes also pointed out the deficiency of Aristotle’s theory that he did not extend themeaning of the metaphor to the nature of language[2].
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1.2 Rationale of the Study
The first reason to make the present study is the importance of the economic newsdiscourses in our society and our life. As the vital window of knowing and exploring theworld economy, business people, government officials, and students who learningbusiness and linguists is paying great attention to news reading, especially news ofeconomic discourses. The more updated information people get, the more opportunitiesand chances to succeed they have. As a matter of fact, people have longed for the help ofmetaphor to better understand the phenomenon in economic field. In addition to somewell-known metaphor terms such as bull and bear stock markets, cash currency, there areplenty of other metaphors in economic news which provide a fresh perspective to studyeconomic discourses.The second reason for taking on the present study is the possibility and practicality.Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory, with further development, has become animportant tool to elucidate the essence of metaphor. When Halliday establishes thegrammatical metaphor theory, as the important components of the systemic-functionallinguistics, he takes the viewpoint that the systemic-function can be employed in theanalysis and interpretation of texts. What’s more, Halliday has succeeded in applyinggrammatical metaphor to the scientific discourse and in the summary of features inscientific discourse language. Other kinds of discourses, such as discourses of law,leaders’ speeches, commercial contract and legal documents are also researched by manyother researchers. These studies and the revelation features of these discourses proved thatthe study of metaphor theory in economic discourses is possible and meaningful, whereas,there are relatively limited researches into it.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Literature Review of Grammatical Metaphor
Along with the flourishing of metaphor research, the concept of “grammaticalmetaphor” has been an academic hotspot in the past few decades. GM is different frommetaphor because GM is a variation in the meaning of a given expression while metaphoris about a word used with a transferred meaning[6]. After we make clear of the differenceof metaphor and grammatical metaphor, it is of necessity to mention some original studiesof grammatical metaphor. Although grammatical metaphor was generally regarded as one of the branches thatdivided from metaphor until the conception of GM was proposed officially in 1985, somescholars noticed the existence of GM. According to Alford, GM’s usage and realizationcould be traced back to ancient Greece when many grammatical terms were created bymetaphorizing of the material world[7]. And in the Middle Ages, the application ofmetaphors appeared in different fields and various social pheromones were reflected bysome grammatical terms and theories. Hu Zhuanglin classified GM in this period of timeinto three groups based on the formation of GM: 1) metaphorizing the real world withgrammatical terms; 2) metaphorizing the real world with grammatical structures; 3)metaphorizing the real world with grammatical theories[8].
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2.2 The Studies of News Discourse
Before reviewing on the research of news discourses, the meaningful and the functionof news played in our modern society has to be referred to. With modern technology, thetransmitting of information has a variety of channels to reach pubic people. However,people tend to depend upon news as the key media to get the information of the recentevents. In addition, people are likely to know the lives of other people, social life and thecustoms of different countries through news. Most of all, the news play an important rolein determining people’s perception of their view of polities and economic situation of theworld to a large extent. All of these determine that news discourses are the centered andindispensable way in mass communication, which gives a good reason to explore the GMsin news. By means of decoding GM may help people have a better understanding of thenews language and find the ideology hidden in news discourse. Before discussing GM in news discourse, we should offer a survey of news discourse.In order to make a better understanding of what news discourse is, we would like toborrow Van Dijk’s definition of news discourse. According to van Dijk, news discourse isa text or discourse on radio, on TV or in the news paper, in which news information aboutrecent events is given[26]. While news stories or news reports are used by some otherscholars referring to news discourse. In this thesis, we just follow the tradition of Van Dijk.But owing to the definition given by van Dijk is so general, editorials, columns to weatherforecasts and advertisements all belong to sub-discourse of news. In this dissertation, weonly choose one aspect of news-economic news discourse as our research subject in orderto make a differential from previous studies.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework .........19
3.1 Halliday’s Classification of Grammatical Metaphor .........19
3.1.1 Ideational Metaphor.........19
3.1.2 Interpersonal Metaphor .........21
3.2 Realization of Grammatical Metaphor.........23
3.2.1 Realization of Ideational Metaphor .........23
3.2.2 Realization of Interpersonal Metaphor .........27
Chapter Four Research Methodology ......... 29
4.1 Research Questions.........29
4.2 Source of the Corpus......... 29
4.3 Research Methods.........30
Chapter Five Analysis of Grammatical Metaphors.........31
5.1 The Identification of Ideational and Interpersonal Metaphor .........31
5.2 Statistics of Grammatical Metaphors .........32
5.3 Findings and Discussion of Ideational Metaphor......... 32
5.4 Findings and Discussion of Interpersonal Metaphor........... 44
Chapter Five Analysis of Grammatical Metaphors inEconomic News Discourse
5.1 The Identification of Ideational and Interpersonal Metaphor
As the main part of this chapter, identifying the GMs in the disclosed corpus is thefirst and the most difficult step of the statistic, which lay the foundation of the followingverification of the universality and abundance of GMs. The above theories explained andelucidated in the former chapters will be applied in identifying each type of GMs. In order to clearly study the application of GMs in economic news discourse, theauthor adopts the following procedure: The first step is to identify the GMs in the selectedmaterials. The second step is to list the overall frequency and occurrence of grammaticalmetaphor in English economic news discourses in form of table. The third step is to revealthe distribution of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor and reasons throughanalyzing the samples in detail, and finally explore the reason.Whether GM is universal and abundant in news discourse or not will be found out inthis part through the analysis of the data collected. The data analysis and its special formin new reports are also summarized into the following tables. Even though there are somedifferences of GMs resulting from the selection of process types, it will not influence thepresent study.
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Conclusion
This thesis endeavors to explore the application of GM in economic news discoursewithin the theoretical model of systemic-functional grammar. The statistics in the abovechapters supply the solid evidence that universal and abundant GMs exist in Englisheconomic news and they do occur at three level of transitivity system- the selection ofprocess type, configuration of transitivity functions, sequences of group-phrase classes.Compared with interpersonal metaphor, ideational metaphor is more favorable ineconomic news discourses in order to endow the economic news with superficial featureof neutrality and objectivity and make people firmly believe the truth of the news.Ideational metaphor, especially in the form of nominalization, in a certain degree,increases the conciseness and accuracy of English economic news, which conforms to thefeatures of news report. Besides, the application of metaphor of modality, as one type ofinterpersonal grammatical metaphor, keeps the reports away from personal opinionleaving the readers neutrality impression without any doubt. The application of metaphorof mood, as the other type of interpersonal metaphor, is mainly used to increase emotionand catch readers’ attention.
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Reference (omitted)