对英语广告语篇中语法隐喻现象功能的研究

摘要

论文题目：对英语广告语篇中语法隐喻现象功能的研究

专业：外国语言学及应用语言学

研究生：张绍兵

指导教师：张发祥教授

摘要

广告语言是广告的重要组成部分，中外许多学者分别从符号学、文体学、语用学、话语分析以及功能语言学等多个角度对广告语言进行了研究。本文在上述研究的基础上，尝试以系统功能语言学中语法隐喻理论为框架和依据，对英语广告语言进行研究。语法隐喻这一术语最早是由韩礼德在1985年提出，它是系统功能语言学的一个重要组成部分。韩礼德根据语言意义和措辞之间的一致性程度，把表达相同意义的不同语法形式分为一致式和隐喻式，并根据隐喻式所体现的功能将语法隐喻分为概念隐喻和人际隐喻。马丁在韩礼德的基础上提出了语篇隐喻的概念，并且采用了隐喻性主位和隐喻性新信息两种语篇隐喻的观点。为此，中外许多学者将语法隐喻理论应用于各种文体分析之中，比如对科技语篇、新闻语篇和法律语篇的分析。

本文尝试将广告语言作为分析研究的对象，旨在分析广告语言中语法隐喻现象的功能和作用。语言作为一种意义潜势，服务于交际目的，注重语言选择。我们发现在英语广告语言中，语法隐喻现象大量存在，从不同方面共同服务于广告的吸引和劝说等交际目的，语法隐喻的运用是广告语言选择的重要方面。在本文中，语法隐喻对实现广告语言交际目的的作用主要体现在三个方面，即，具有三个主要的功能：吸引的功能，劝说的功能和提供信息的功能。吸引的功能体现在“突出”和“并列”在广告标题和宣传口号的广泛应用上；劝说的功能则重点体现在“亲切感培养”，“行为主体神秘化”和“预设”上；提供信息的功能包括“填补信息空缺”，“节省空间”和“指称已知信息”。本文详细分析了语法隐喻现象在英语广告语言中的作用和功能，这一研究将为广告语言的分析提供了一个新的视角，同时也扩大了语法隐喻理论的研究范围。

关键词：广告语言；语法隐喻；功能

论文类型：语用学

I

ABSTRACT

Subject: A Study on the Functions of GM in English Advertising Texts Specialty: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Name: Zhang Shaobing

Supervisor: Professor Zhang Faxiang

Abstract

Advertising language is one of the most important elements in advertisement. Many scholars both abroad and at home have made researches on advertising language from different perspectives, such as the semiotic approach, the stylistic approach, the pragmatic approach, the discourse analysis approach and the functional approach. Based on these researches, this thesis attempts to investigate advertising language in the light of the theory of systemic-functional linguistics on grammatical metaphor. The term of grammatical metaphor was first put forward by M.A.K. Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985. It is an important part of Systemic-Functional Grammar. Based on the congruence between language meaning and its expression, Halliday divided the different grammatical forms with the same meaning into congruent forms and metaphorical forms. According to the metafunctions of metaphorical form, GM can be divided into ideational GM and interpersonal GM. Based on this research, Martin put forward the term of textual GM in 1996. He thought that there were two realizations of textual GM: metaphorical theme and metaphorical new information. Thus many scholars employ this theory in the analysis of various discourses, such as the science discourse, news discourse and legal discourse.

This thesis attempts to study advertising language and aims to analyze the functions of GM in advertising language. Language as a kind of meaning potential, to realize the communication purpose is its central aim, and the selection of language is especially important. We find that GM is indeed widely used in English ads and it plays an important role in realizing ad’s communication purpose of attracting and persuading. In this thesis, the author will discuss the functions of GM from three aspects: the attracting function, the persuading function and the informing function. The attracting function will be explained from two perspectives, foregrounding and parallelism; the function of persuading includes three aspects: cultivating intimacy, mystifying the agency and presupposition; and last, the informing function of GM

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Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology

includes filling information gap, saving space and referring known information. This thesis analyzes the functions of GM in ads in detail, we hope that this research can provide a new angle of view in advertising language analysis, and meanwhile broaden the scope of GM study.

Key Words: advertising language; grammatical metaphor; function Dissertation Type: Pragmatics

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Chapter One Introduction

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 The topic of this study

Advertisement has a close relation with people’s daily life, and it is the product of modern society. Advertisement is a kind of public notice mainly offering goods, services, etc. At present, we can see various kinds of advertisements in every corner such as in the newspapers, magazines, on the televisions, radios, internet, and even on the clothes and buses. In general, there are mainly two kinds of advertisements, the spoken advertisements and the written advertisements. According to the content of advertisements, they can be divided into two kinds as well: commercial advertisements and public advertisements. Public advertisements are different from commercial advertisements. Public advertisements are usually supported by governments or large companies. Earning money is not their aim, and their aim is mainly to improve the civilization of a society.

Nowadays, written advertisement as the main part of advertisements plays a very important role in many aspects. Up to now, advertisements have formed their own characteristics. There are mainly three functions of them. The first is that they can provide new information of goods and services to the consumers. Secondly, it can promote the sales volume in respect of the producers and sellers. The third function is in the view of public advertisements. So to attract and to persuade the audience can be regarded as the direct purpose of one advertisement. As for its linguistic characteristics, many scholars devote themselves to probing into advertising language from different perspectives, such as the semiotic approach, pragmatic approach, stylistic approach, discourse analysis approach, and functional approach.

Grammatical metaphor (GM for short) is an important part in functional grammar. The term of grammatical metaphor was first put forward by M.A.K. Halliday in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985. Halliday [1] and some other scholars such as Ravelli [2] and Thompson [3] have attempted to give a provisional definition of grammatical metaphor; and they also have applied GM theory in the researches on many different styles of texts. Halliday is the founder of the theory of GM and he has done some discussion about scientific texts from the view of GM. But

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Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology

scientific text is not a popular style for readers to read. Some other scholars also have done their researches on different styles of texts from the view of GM. In this thesis, the research of GM is to focus on the advertising text, which can be of enlightenment since ad is a particular style of text that is widely read by the public.

According to the statement mentioned above, this thesis is to take English advertising language as the target, in the light of Systemic-Functional Grammar theory and aims at investigating and analyzing GM’s functions in advertising language. In this way, we hope to understand more about advertising language and the theory of GM.

1.2 The theoretical basis of the study

The main theoretical basis of this thesis is Systemic-Functional Grammar with M.A.K Halliday [1] as its principal founder. Systemic-Functional Grammar had been developed all through the 1950s to the 1980s. In Systemic-Functional Grammar, language is viewed as a product of social activity. Now, Systemic-Functional Grammar has been given a prominent status in current linguistic studies, and it is a current linguistic theory that suits the purposes of systematically examining texts in terms of the ways in which the functions relate to context.

In Systemic-Functional Grammar, language has three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. In Halliday’s eyes, these three metafunctions are all semantic concepts; and like all the other semantic concepts, the concept of metafunction is realized by the help of language system. The major aim of Hallidayan linguists is to construct a grammar for the purpose of text analysis [4]. Halliday himself has engaged in the application of Systemic-Functional Grammar to the interpretation of both literary and non-literary texts [5]. As an important part of Systemic-Functional Grammar, GM theory also provides a good frame for discourse analysis.

Halliday [1] first proposes the idea of “grammatical metaphor”, but he does not give a clear definition about it, and he does not even give clear criteria of “congruent” which he puts as a key term in explaining “grammatical metaphor”. At first, Halliday [1] categorizes GM into two types, namely, the ideational grammatical metaphor (ideational GM for short) and the interpersonal grammatical metaphor (interpersonal 2

Chapter One Introduction

GM for short) in correspondence with ideational metafunction and interpersonal metafunction. Martin [6], following Halliday, proposes a third type, that is textual metaphor, which is in line with textual metafunction. Halliday and Matthiessen [7] point out that GM is a kind of conjunction. As for “textual metaphor”, Halliday hasn’t recognized it definitely. Later, Halliday [1] names 13 types of GM ignoring the distinction of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. On the base of Halliday’s research, Ravelli [8] points that: GM is not simply “same signified, different signifier”. It can have negative effect towards the meaning. Although many linguists discuss about GM, they do not reach an agreement about what it really is [9].

In China, many scholars also do researches on GM, such as Hu Zhuanglin, Zhu Yongsheng, Yan Shiqing and Fan Wenfang. Fan’s [10] doctoral dissertation is about GM. In her dissertation she tries to establish a theoretical system exploring grammatical metaphor in a systemic-functional approach. She adds textual metaphor to Halliday’s framework of GM, but the semantic meaning of textual GM is still unsolved.

And, as for advertising language (ad for short), some studies have been done, but many researches about ads are restricted to the field of genre analysis, while in this paper, the starting point is GM theory and GM’s functions in the written ads. GM theory will be used to investigate its functions in the advertising language. Many linguists did researches on GM in scientific text, but seldom did systematic research about GM in ads, let alone the functions of GM in ads. Above all, how Grammatical Metaphor is used and what function it achieves in advertising language is welcome in a research. This is what the author wants to answer in this thesis.

1.3 The purpose and significance of the study

Although Halliday and Martin had done some researches about GM’s use in science texts, science texts are seldom reached by the public. In contrast, ads are easy to get and read. Although some investigations have been done about ads from the view of GM, systematic study of the functions of GM in ads is rare, and what kind of function is realized in which conditions by which kind of GM is not studied closely. So, this present paper intends to investigate GM’s functions in ads from the functional approach.

In the modern society, advertisements are more and more popular in people’s

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daily life. The advertisements of commercial companies are usually creative. In these advertisements, GM plays an important role. So, to analyze these advertisements, studying these language phenomena of GM is very useful.

This thesis is both theoretically and practically oriented. In theory this thesis can broaden the field of GM research. In practice this thesis provides a new angle of view in analyzing advertising language, and also provides some implications for advertisers.

1.4 The data collection of this thesis

Having specified the subjects of the study, the author started to collect the sample advertising texts. According to the need of analysis, any piece of ad that can fulfill the purpose of analyzing and any piece of ad that the author found and can make use of has been selected and put into a database. It includes about 300 different advertisements both commercial and uncommercial, most of the examples come from Qi Yunfang’s book Advertising and English Advertisement [11], Hua Ying and Ma Yongtang’s book English Level through Ads-Reading [12], and some compilations of English ads that written by different scholars. Still some other data are from the contemporary newspapers and magazines, which possess abundant written English advertisements. All those examples are English ones, though only part of them are selected originally from temporary English magazines or newspapers, they are all from representative channels in order to be persuasive and convincing.

This thesis is carried out by combining qualitative and quantitive methods, in which qualitative is the primary method while the quantitative method is mainly used to provide the data that are needed in this thesis. The results of the findings are illustrated by specific and typical examples drawn from the samples database.

1.5 The organization of the dissertation

The dissertation falls into five chapters. Here is the general introduction about the organization of this paper:

The first chapter is the introduction part. It gives a general introduction to some key factors concerning this study, which includes the research topic, theoretical basis, purpose and significance, and the organization of the whole thesis.

Chapter Two is the literature review of studies on advertising language and GM

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Chapter One Introduction

theory. Several approaches to the language of advertising would be assessed. Several influential linguists’ view on GM will be presented as well.

Chapter Three displays the theoretical basis for this thesis and gives a suggested framework for this thesis. GM theory is systematically elaborated, including the definition of GM and its three subtypes, which provides a suggested framework for the following analysis. This chapter provides a guideline of the exploration of GM phenomenon in advertising language for chapter four.

Chapter Four is the backbone of the whole thesis. It includes a general detection of three subtypes of GM in advertising language, and the detailed analysis of GM’s functions in advertising language. Attracting function is discussed from two aspects, foregrounding and parallelism. Persuading function includes cultivating intimacy, mystifying the agency and presupposition. Informing function is explained from three parts, namely, filling information gap, saving space and referring to the known information.

Chapter Five is the conclusion part which gives a conclusion of this study, a short summary of the whole thesis, and furthermore presents the limitations of the study and prospects for future research.

In summary, in order to get the special style effect and achieve a special function, three types of GM are frequently employed in advertising language.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

6Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Introduction

Advertisement is a modern thing. Advertising language has its own features. In the past two decades, linguists both at home and abroad were interested in the study of advertising language. Nowadays, advertising language draws more and more attention. Many scholars exert themselves to probe into advertising language from different perspectives, such as the semiotic approach, pragmatic approach, stylistic approach, discourse analysis approach, and functional approach. All these approaches have made great contributions to the different characteristics and attributes of advertising language.

GM theory is an important part of functional linguistics. The term of GM was first put forward by Halliday in 1985. GM is different from the traditional metaphor in rhetoric, and it has a broader meaning. Halliday [1] has a systemic research on GM in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar. From then on, many other linguists followed his study, and developed some new ideas about GM.

2.2 Previous studies on advertising language

First of all, the previous studies on advertising language should be introduced. Advertising language is quite a good subject for linguists to study for its great influence on our daily life and its special wording characteristics. There have been several approaches that have done their contribution to the study of advertising language, such as the semiotic approach, the stylistic approach, the pragmatic approach, the discourse analysis approach and the functional approach. Here, it is necessary to have a general review on them.

Semiotic approach is based on the assumption that communication is achieved by encoding and decoding a message [13]. Williams [14] has proposed the decoding advertisements for the first time. Semiotic analysis depends on similarities other than uniqueness. Roland Barthes [15] divides advertising language into three kinds of messages: the linguistic message which contains the caption and labels; the coded

Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology

iconic message which is the connotations of the picture that form the image of the product; the non-coded iconic message that is the denotation of the photograph [13]. Barthes’ insight that one can derive several different pieces of information from a single advertisement is valuable for the present study.

The stylistic approach is the most popular approach in studying advertising language. Scholars usually explore the distinguishing stylistic features of advertising on different levels of language: phonology, graphology, lexicon, and grammar [16]. Leech [17] has made great contributions in this aspect. Based on a sample of 617 television advertisements from 1960-1961, Leech argues that advertising language has developed a distinctive colloquial style. Leech also has got a statistical result that 3% of all words are occurrences of the second person pronouns, 20% of all independent clauses are imperative, and passive voice is very rare in his sample [17]. The stylistic approach gives us a picture of how linguistic features are effectively employed in advertisements to work out novel effects.

The pragmatic approach mainly focuses on language use in certain contexts. In advertising language, an advertiser usually uses presuppositions to attract the audiences’ attention and to get the information effectively [18]. In regarding to the interpretation of advertising language, Tanaka [13] gives a systematic analysis of the language of written ads in Britain and Japan within the framework of pragmatics, and explains how communication occurred between the advertiser and the audience. The pragmatic approach of advertising language concerns the interpretation of advertising structure most, and in the pragmatic approach of studying advertising language, the speech act theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principles [19] and Wilson & Sperber’s Relevance Theory [20] are frequently used by the scholars both abroad and at home.

Structuralist Harris [21] publishes an article named Discourse Analysis in a magazine named Language. In this article, he analyzes a hair tonic advertisement; and his analysis on the relations between sentences, language and culture, and the relations between discourse and social situation opened the era of discourse analysis. According to Cook [22], advertising language can be seen as a discourse type. And later, many researchers put ads as the main target of their study. Huang Guowen [4] published his book Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis: A Study in Advertising Discourse in 2001. He attempts to analyze advertising discourse from Halliday’s functional

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Chapter Two Literature Review

linguistics; various linguistic levels of advertising language are analyzed systematically in Huang’s book [4].

The functional approach is based on the three metafunctions of language in functional grammar. Among these three metafunctions of language, the functionalists assume that the interpersonal function plays an important role in both providing advertising information and persuading the audience into a purchasing behavior. So, advertisers frequently use interrogatives and imperatives to make the audience to buy their products or services. Fries’s study [23] of the thematic structure of advertising discourse is enlightening. Fries analyzes the thematic structure and information structure of advertising language as well as the new information in Rheme [24].

2.3 Previous studies on GM theory

In this section, it is to give a brief review on the development of GM theory. GM is first proposed by Halliday [1] and later enriched by many other scholars, both abroad and at home.

2.3.1 Halliday and GM

As for grammatical metaphor，there is still no widely accepted agreement on its definition and classification.

It’s Halliday who first put forward the idea of grammatical metaphor. In Halliday’s theory about GM, he divides GM into ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor, but he has not admitted the existence of textual metaphor which is deemed by many scholars as an existing type of GM [10]. Later Halliday [1] even divides GM into 13 types and avoids the use of ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. But there is still no definite explanation about “congruence” and agreement about the types of GM.

The following part is the review of Halliday’s initial idea of GM and his new developments of GM.

In the 1980s, M.A.K. Halliday first noticed that “lexical selection is just one aspect of lexico-grammatical selection” and “there is a strong grammatical element in rhetorical transference” [1]. He declares that “... We find that there is also such a thing

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Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology

as grammatical metaphor, where the variation is essentially in the grammatical forms...” (ibid), i.e. GM is a kind of “variation in the expression of a given meaning” (ibid).

Halliday [1] classifies GM into two kinds: the ideational metaphor (short for ideational grammatical metaphor or ideational GM) and the interpersonal metaphor (short for interpersonal grammatical metaphor or interpersonal GM). By ideational metaphor, he means the variation taking place in the process of choices in the transitivity system of a language, including the selection of process type, the selection of transitivity functions and the selection of sequence of grou p/phrase classes. Variation in any of the selection will result in ideational metaphors, though the syndrome cases are also possible. The interpersonal metaphors are further classified into metaphors of modality and metaphors of mood. Halliday also pointes out that “metaphorical modes of expression are characteristic of all adult discourse” [1] and “Nominalizing is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor” (ibid). Although Halliday does not offer anything new in this respect and only reviews the notions of resemblance, transference and the distinction between literal and non-literal languages, there was one statement: “… From this, metaphor is variation in the expression of meanings” (ibid) that often goes unnoticed by researchers. Fan [10] has pointed that this statement is quite enlightening in understanding GM.

Halliday [1] does not admit the existence of textual grammatical metaphor (textual metaphor or textual GM for short), we can not even find this term in his literature and discourses on GM, but he gives a tacit consent to the term of textual metaphor which is proposed by Martin [6] and supported by many other scholars.

Halliday in his co-work with Matthissen [7] thinks that there is a continuum from congruent form to metaphorical form and divides grammatical metaphor into 13 types while ignoring the terms of “ideational metaphor” and “interpersonal metaphor”. He [7] points out that the grammars of natural language include the potential for rank shift among their resources, though rank shift is not inherently metaphorical. We can see Halliday’s efforts in fulfilling the GM theory.

2.3.2 Previous studies done on GM and Lexical Metaphor

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Chapter Two Literature Review

10In this thesis, it is necessary to mention the difference of two terms: Lexical

Metaphor and GM.

In Fan Wenfang’s view, Lexical Metaphor, which can be traced back to Aristotle,

it concerns the transference between words [10]. For example, “flood”, which means a moving mass of water literally, can mean a moving mass of feeling. The latter is a Lexical Metaphor. Lexical Metaphor concerns the use of a word with a transferred meaning. We can easily see that the study of Lexical Metaphor is concerned with the question “how is this word used?”

The term of GM is coined by Halliday. His perception differs from the usual description of metaphor as variation in the use of words, i.e. a word with a transferred meaning. What’s Halliday concerned with is the question “how is this meaning expressed?” A meaning may be realized by a selection of words that is not expressed

in some sense typical or unmarked, yet lexical selection is just one aspect of lexicogrammatical selection or “wording”. Metaphorical variation is lexicogrammatical rather than simply lexical. The term of GM rightly captures this complex process.

Before exploring the distinction between Lexical Metaphor and GM, let’s look at the following example that Thompson [3] uses to analyze the difference between Lexical Metaphor and Halliday’s GM:

(a) The north is crippled with the burden of the industrial revolution to an extent that the south hardly begins to understand.

In the sentence (a), it is clear that “cripple” is used metaphorically. The word “cripple” has a literal meaning of “blame”, while in this sentence “cripple” means metaphorically “in a difficult situation”. Therefore, we can see that metaphor here is seen as variation in the meaning of a given expression. However, Halliday prefers looking at metaphor from the perspective of the meaning being expressed as mentioned above. For instance, a less metaphorical “translation” of the above example might be:

(b) The north is in a difficult situation because of the effects of the industrial revolution to an extent that the south hardly begins to understand.

Comparing (a) with (b), we are considering the different ways of expressing the “same” meaning instead of different meanings of the same word like “cripple” in (a).

Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology

In this view, metaphor is seen as variation in the expression of a given meaning.

From the examples illustrated we can find GM involves the remapping across the lexicogrammatical stratum while Lexical Metaphor does not. In other words, GM shows the realization across different levels while Lexical Metaphor shows the instantiation at the same level. The following example might help us to understand this issue:

(a) A flood of protests poured in following the announcement.

(b) A large quantity of protests came in following the announcement.

(c) It escapes me. (metaphorical)

(d) I cannot recall it. (congruent)

In example (a), “flood” is a Lexical Metaphor because its meaning has been transferred from a concrete to an abstract sense at the lexicogrammatical level with no grammatical variation. Example (c) is a GM because there is a transfer from material process to (d) which is supposed to be congruent expression of the mental process when the meaning is realized at the lexicogrammatical levels.

In 1996, Halliday mentions this issue again and draws the distinction between Lexical Metaphor and GM in the following way:

“Traditionally the term (metaphor) is applied only to lexical transformations and it is theorized as ‘same signifier, different signified’ … But I shall theorize these as ‘same signified, different signifier’” [1]. That means he puts GM as the different expression of the same meaning, and this is the basic understanding of GM for most of the latter linguists.

2.3.3 Previous studies done on GM by other scholars abroad

As is mentioned in the previous section, GM theory was first put forward by Halliday [1], and GM has attracted a lot of scholars since the moment of its establishment, such as Martin, Ravelli, and Thompson, etc. It would be necessary to address their studies and contributions to the development of GM theory.

Martin [6] made a distinction between the congruent and incongruent metaphorical realizations. To Martin, a congruent relationship is one in which the relationship between semantic and grammatical (incongruent) categories is natural: people, places, and things are realized nominally; actions are realized verbally; logical relations of

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Chapter Two Literature Review

time and consequence are realized conjunctively, and so on. By contrast, unnatural relationships are those in which actions are realized as nouns, and logical relations are realized as verbs. Accordingly, meanings have more than one manner of realizations, either congruently or incongruently. GM is the process whereby meanings are multiply-coded at the level of grammar. Martin attempts to tackle the issue with regard to the three metafunctions (that is, the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function) of language that had been identified in systemic functional linguistics, and thus adds the term textual metaphor to Halliday’s original model. The term “textual metaphor” may be prophetic of some breakthroughs in metaphor researches.

Ravelli [8] is one of the earliest followers of Halliday. In her thesis for B.A. entitled Metaphor, Mode and Complexity: an Exploration of Co-varying Patterns, she explores GM at great length. She states that “GM is a grammatical phenomenon, in that two different grammatical categories (such as a verbal group and a nominal group) may realize largely the same thing” [8]. However, her interpretation is limited to one kind of GM. In her later work, she reinterprets GM as “an alternative lexical realization of a choice in the semantics” [8]. Actually Ravelli’s view on GM is similar with Halliday’s and is just different ways of the same thing.

Being similar to Martin [6], Thompson’s treatment [3] on the phenomenon of GM also includes a third kind, the textual metaphor. Thompson’s opinion is based on the assumption that the presence of metaphor can be recognized by the need for a double transitivity analysis, one of the original wording and the other of a more congruent rewording; and there are in fact two types of thematic structure which also need a double analysis. Thompson [3] also gives a detailed analysis of the function of nominalization in the creation of grammatical metaphors, and the terms such as encapsulation and condensation he employs may well prove useful for our understanding of the phenomenon under discussion.

2.3.4 Previous studies and improvement done on GM at home

Some Chinese scholars have turned from merely introducing foreign theories to challenging foreign authorities and offering their own insightful outlooks on various issues. In this part of the present paper, we cannot fail to mention Hu Zhuanglin, Zhu

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Master’s Dissertation of Henan University of Science and Technology Yongsheng, YanShiqing and Fan Wenfang for their contributions to the research of GM.

According to Hu Zhuanglin [25], the fashion of employing GM and Lexical Metaphor reaches its peak in the Middle Ages and one can trace such instances in various facets of human life, such as religion, politics, literature and philosophy. Hu [25] also points out that some American functionalists have been studying iconicity, isomorphism and grammaticalization, others have been studying conceptual metaphor and structural metaphor, although those terms are different, their researches fall into different categories of GM. Hu’s views broaden our perspective and the scope of GM study. According to Hu, a metaphorical expression must correspond to another literal form, i.e. congruence, and it is realized by the congruent form. Hu [25] concludes that the reality is reflected in language in terms of grammatical forms through processes of metaphorization.

Zhu Yongsheng [26] further argues that the most obvious defect in Halliday’s theorization is that the distinction between congruent and incongruent forms lacks explicitness and has no fixed or applicable criteria. However, Yan Shiqing [27] compromises a bit and points out that since metaphoricity is a matter of degree, there seems little sense in looking for a fixed criterion for congruence, which might also be dynamic by nature, and thus the implicitness with the term congruence is not only permissible but perhaps necessary to some extent. What’s more, Yan [27] also holds the opinion that the difference between GM and Lexical Metaphor is more a matter of perspective than essence, and they can be complementary to each other.

Fan Wenfang [10] has done a lot of studies on GM in such papers as “Metaphors of Mood in English” [28], “Nominalization and Its Cohesive Function in a Text” [29], to name just a few. In her doctoral dissertation in 1997, she perfects Halliday’s theory by providing a new framework with the employment of a third GM: textual metaphor, just like Martin and Thompson. She is the first and the only Chinese scholar so far that explicates GM in great detail. According to Fan [10], Ravelli’s interpretation of GM as “a grammatical phenomenon, in that two different grammatical categories (such as a verbal group and a nominal group) may realize largely the same thing” [8] is too narrow to define GM since it is actually another way of saying the same thing as Halliday’s definition.

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14Fan also investigates the merits and demerits of other people’s study on GM, and

provides a tentative definition to GM: “Grammatical metaphor is an incongruent realization of meanings, involving transference of grammatical units from one domain to another, either from a basic domain to a subdomain, or from one subdomain to another subdomain” [10].

2.4 Previous linguistic studies from the perspective of GM Theory

Since GM theory is of great importance in functional grammar and becomes more and more attractive to linguists an d researchers both abroad and at home, many have done researches on different language phenomena by using the theory of GM, such as on scientific texts, news texts, and ads as well.

Halliday [30] himself has done many researches on scientific texts and got great achievements; while in China, Dong Hongle did his research on scientific texts and published his book Metaphorization in Scientific Discourse[31]; what’s more, many other researchers also published their papers to offer their discussion on GM’s use in different styles of texts. News and legal texts also have been studied from this view, no matter it is corpus-based or qualitative analysis, all have found that GM had been widely used in the scientific texts as well as news, legal and advertising texts, and played important role in them.

Dong Hongle [31], in his book Metaphorization in Scientific Discourse, not only discusses about the differences between Lexical Metaphor and GM, but also discusses about GM’s functions of generating new words and new concepts, making the scientific discourse more objective and precise, and ultimately causing it to form a kind of linguistic hegemony. He also categorizes different GMs into forms like Concretization, Magnification, Animalization, Minimization, Mechanization, Mutual-fertilization, De-technicalization. All these must be a great contributive improvement to the study of GM. Some other people like Jia Jun [32] publish papers on discussing the characteristics of scientific discourse from GM, which also are good attempts.

As for the news and legal texts, many scholars like Chen Zitao [33], Gao Mingqiang [34], Xu Jin [35] did their researches on it from the theory of GM as well. In general, they find that, like in scientific texts, GM is also widely used in news discourses and legal texts. GM can make them more acceptable for its seemingly

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objectivity and impartiality. No matter it is corpus-based or qualitative analysis, all those studies are beneficial for our understanding of GM’s applications.

As for the advertising discourses, few people have done the similar kind of research. Some researchers have only published related papers to discuss the existence of GM in ads or to analyze the use of ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor, or textual metaphor in ads differently. Since a thorough research on the functions of GM in ads hasn’t been done, this thesis is intentionally to do so.

In a general sense, in written advertising language, GM can make the advertising language more creative and vivid. From the study of advertising language from the perspective of GM, it is helpful for our understanding on GM and for the ads writing. In this case, this thesis provides a new angle for advertisements analysis and broadens the study scope of GM theory, and simultaneously, it also provides some implications for the advertisers.

2.5 Previous studies of GM’s functions in different styles of texts

The widely applications of GM in different styles of texts must play a certain roles in them, and the functions them have functioned also have been discussed by the researchers.

In news texts, some researchers have done their study both from the view of corpus-based and qualitative analysis. What is the most important findings is that there indeed exits abundant GM in news texts and different GM has their own special role. Tang Lina [36] investigates the news texts by comparison the news of both VOA and CRI, and finds that, GM is universal and abundant in both English and Chinese English-version news, what is more, she finds that, in order to endow the news with superficial feature of neutrality and objectivity and make people firmly believe the truth of the news, ideational GM especially the GM resulting from the configuration of transitivity functions and the sequence of group-phrase classes is more favorable. Xu Jin [35] gives a more detailed discussion about GM’s functions in news texts, and divides GM’s functions into six parts, namely, signifying, expanding, condensing, conjunction, forming concept and optimizing. And his study is a good attempt in investigating GM’s functions in a specific style of English texts.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

16In scientific texts, first, it is Halliday himself did some researches on the

application of nominalization, and he found “nominalizing is the single most powerful resource for creating GM” [1]. Later, many people paid much attention to the use of GM in scientific texts and achieving many findings. As we have mentioned previously, Dong Hongle [31] not only discussed about the difference of Lexical Metaphor and GM, but also gave discussions on GM’s functions of generating new words and new concepts, making the scientific discourse more objective and precise, and ultimately causing it to form a kind of linguistic hegemony. He also categorizes different GMs into forms like Concretization, Magnification, Animalization, Minimization, Mechanization, Mutual-fertilization, De-technicalization. Some other people follow him and publish papers on discussing the characteristics and functions of GM in scientific discourses. Which also made good attempts but the main points are just like Dong Hongle’s view.

As for legal texts, Under the supervision of Yan Shiqing, Chen Zhitao [33] does his study on the legal texts from the view of GM and finds that, in the legal texts, like in news and scientific texts, GM is also universal and abundant, it makes the legal texts more normal and objective, more brief and unchangeable. This is quite a good attempt, and this gives me more confident to investigate GM in the ad texts.

Huang Guowen [4] and many other researchers have done their studies from different point of view on advertising language, including from the point of GM. However, few people have done the researches to find GM’s functions in ads. So in this thesis, we will have a discussion. The author thinks that there are mainly three functions of GM in ads according to the detailed analysis; they are the function of attracting, persuading and informing. The detailed discussion will be given in Chapter Four, and the next chapter will give a suggested framework for the analysis.

2.6 Summary

In this chapter, it has reviewed the previous studies of advertising language and the improvements of GM theory.

Many scholars have made great contributions to the study of advertising language from different perspectives, we can see that these studies have contributed to the comprehensive understanding of advertising discourse, and there is still much room

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left to explore.

From the above literature, we can see that the theory of GM is relatively a new way in discourse analysis, and advertising language is a kind of modern discourse, so this thesis wants to analyze the advertising discourse from the perspective of GM theory, in order to find the functions of GM’s application, by providing a new sight of analyzing advertising language and broadening the field of GM research.

So much for what this chapter has discussed, in the next chapter, a suggest framework will be given, and Chapter Four will talk about the functions and meanings of different types of GMs in advertising language respectively. And one point is to be noticed, this thesis will place nominalization as the main subject and other forms of GM as attributive ones since nominalization is most representative in GM’s using in ads. On the contrary, no matter which type of GM, it can serve the similar functions well in practice.

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