iii ABSTRACT This thesis focuses on the use of grammatical metaphor in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech. To fulfill this aim, the concept of “grammatical metaphor” is examined. The thesis starts by explaining the notion of “metaphor” in general and distinguishes lexical metaphor from grammatical metaphor in particular. Then, a study on grammatical metaphors in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance speech is implemented based on the theoretical background of Halliday (1994) and Halliday & Matthiessen (1999).
This is a descriptive research with both quantitative and qualitative techniques in data analysis. Two types of grammatical metaphors are ideational and interpersonal metaphors are densely used from the text. In ideational metaphor type, Barack Obama mainly used type 1 (quality → thing), 2 (process → thing), 5 (process → quality), 6 (circumstance → quality), 13 (thing → various) with high frequency. In interpersonal metaphor type, metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality are explained and illustrated to highlight the attitude and emotion of the speaker.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….ii TABLE OF FIGURES…………………………………….iii CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION……………………. Aims of the study…………………………………………………………………………. Scope of the study…………………………………………………. Method of the study………………………………………………….
Format of the study ………………………………………….2 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………………………. Lexical metaphor: Traditional view “from below”………………………………5 2. Grammatical metaphor: New view “from above” ………………………………7 2. Definition of grammatical metaphor….
Classification of grammatical metaphor………………………………………13 2. Lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor………………….………………20 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.…21 CHAPTER 3: The use of grammatical metaphors in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech…………………………………………………………………. Metaphorical modes of expression in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech…………………………………………………………………. Metaphors of mood ………………………………….
Metaphors of modality ……………………………………………. Implications for teachers……………………………………………. Suggestions for further study……………………………………….XXVII LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vi TABLE OF FIGURES Table 1: Process types, their meanings and key participants.…9 Table 2: Giving or Demanding, Goods - & - Services or Information.……10 Table 3: Metafunctions and their reflexes in the grammar.…11 Table 4: Modality system. (from Halliday 1994: 360) …………………………………20 Table 5: Typical and metaphorical realizations of speech functions in mood types………………………………………………………….21 Table 6: Types of grammatical metaphor.26 Table 7: Types of ideational metaphors in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech………………………………………………………………….28 Table 8: Types of metaphors of mood in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech………………………………………………………………….33 Table 9: Types of metaphors of modality in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech……………………………………………………….34 Firgure 1: Direction of metaphorization.27 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com -1- CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale Metaphor is a well-known phenomenon in language. Thus, it has received attention in a myriad of disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, semiotics, stylistics, psychology, pedagogy and so on. Halliday, the author of the famous work “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” is one of the linguists who spent long time to study on metaphor in general and grammatical metaphor in particular. He recognized that lexical metaphor which traditional researches always mentioned is only one aspect of metaphor and there is a strong grammatical element in rhetorical transference which is called grammatical metaphor.
In addition, in this work, Halliday states that “metaphorical modes of expression are characteristic of all adult discourse”. Therefore, I believe that all speeches can have included this phenomenon. It is also the reason why I chose one famous speech of a famous President to examine grammatical metaphor used in it. Moreover, now Barack Obama is an American President who is famous for not only his talent in political field but also in numerous persuasive speeches because the language he chooses always makes his speech powerful and convincing.
One of the strategies that we are easy to recognize in all his speeches is using not only lexical metaphors but also grammatical metaphors to make the discourse vivid and easy to understand for all classes of citizen. In conclusion, I chose this topic because of my interest in metaphor in general and grammatical metaphor in particular; the appearance with high frequency of metaphor in adult speeches and the admiration to American President Barack Obama’s powerful and convincing speeches. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Aims of the study This study aims at examining the use of metaphorical modes of expression in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech from a systemic functional perspective.
Features of grammatical metaphor used in this speech will be analyzed following the approach of systemic functional linguistics to understand the roles of grammatical metaphors in developing and structuring this discourse. Scope of the study This study attempts to look at how Barack Obama uses grammatical metaphors in his Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech. The analysis will follow Halliday’s work “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” as the framework and Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech will be taken as source of data for illustration. Method of the study Since the thesis sets its main objective of investigating the use of grammatical metaphor in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, it is a descriptive research which reexamines the senses in which the grammatical metaphors are used.
The techniques involved in data analysis are both qualitative and quantitative. Format of the study The study is composed of four chapters Chapter 1: Introduction ─ presents the rationale, the aims, the scope, the methodology and the format of the study. Chapter 2: Literature Review ─ provides the theoretical background of the study. It examines aspects of metaphor and focuses on the nature of grammatical metaphor.
Chapter 3: The Study ─ is the main part of the study which investigates the use of grammatical metaphor in Barack Obama’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com -3- Chapter 4: Conclusion ─ summarizes the main contents of the study and offers implications for teachers and makes suggestions for further studies. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com -4- CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2. Introduction Language is a systematic resource for expressing meaning in context and linguistics is the study of how people exchange meanings through the use of language.
Metaphor is one of the most interesting phenomena in this language system and users who want to find the meaning of metaphors must put them in the context to understand the real meanings expressed. Metaphor is not a new topic, however, when dealing with this term, most of the learners will think about traditional view of metaphor which is called lexical metaphor. Many people do not know that there exists the second form of metaphor that is grammatical metaphor, which is developed by Halliday (1994), Martin (1985, 1992), Thompson (1996), H. The following sections will be restricted to a number of key points in the theory which are closely related to the topic of this thesis – grammatical metaphor.
Firstly, we will provide some definitions of “metaphor” with the example in general. Secondly, a detailed description of lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor will be made to see the nature of two kinds of metaphor. Then, the relationship between lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor is dealt with by Halliday’s viewpoint. Thus, the following parts are organized around the headings: Metaphor; lexical metaphor: traditional view “from below”; grammatical metaphor: new view “from above”; lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor.
Metaphor Metaphor is a well-known phenomenon in language. It catches attention and interest of many stylisticians, linguists, cognitive poeticians and so on. They are interested in the way of transferring mental constructs and mapping one mental representation onto another when reading texts. Thus, they have consistently drawn attention to the system of conceptual transfer in both literary and in everyday discourse, and one important trope, through which this conceptual transfer is carried out, is metaphor.
“Metaphor” is derived from the Greek meta-, “beyond” and phora, which is derived from pherein, “to carry”. In its original, etymological sense, metaphors refer to a kind of movement from one thing to LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com -5- another: one thing is carried beyond itself to something different. The modern definitions of metaphor still keep its nature but they are developed more concrete and detailed. We will mention to some of the definitions of metaphor as follows.
A simplified definition is that metaphor is a “mapping of the structure of a source model onto a target model” (Ungerer and Schmid 1999: 120). This definition has not yet been stated precisely what a domain is and how a source model is different from the target model. Although Simpson (2004: 41) has a similar definition, his concept overcomes this shortcoming. He states that “A metaphor is a process of mapping between two different conceptual domains.
The different domains are known as the target domain and the source domain. The target domain is the topic or concept that you want to describe through the metaphor while the source domain refers to the concept that you draw upon in order to create the metaphorical construction”. Without dealing with source domain and target domain, Halliday (1994: 340) provides an understandable and simple concept of metaphor as “a word is used for something resembling that which it usually refers to”. Consider the following examples: “A flood of protests poured in following the announcement” (1) “The government still hopes to stem the tide of inflation”(2) In these two examples, metaphors are “flood….poured in”, “stem the tide”.
They are transferred from concrete senses “a large quantity…came in”, “resist the force of” to abstract senses. Lexical metaphor: Traditional view “from below” The traditional approach to metaphor is to look at it “from below” as variation in the meaning of a given expression (Halliday 1994: 342). It means we look at metaphorical movement from a literal to a figurative meaning. One particular word has its own literal meaning and it is used to express a new figurative meaning.
Because it is a lexeme (word) which lies at the basis of the metaphorical expression, thus, this expression can be called lexical metaphor. Taverniers (2004) introduces the definition of lexical metaphor as “a LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com -6- feature which belongs to the lexicon of a language: it refers to the possibility of lexemes to express new, metaphorical meanings”. If analyzing the first example above with traditional view “from below”, literally, “flood” is “a moving mass of water” and metaphorically, “flood” is “a moving mass of felling or rhetoric”. Because of myriad of different disciplines study on lexical metaphor, there exists numerous different types of lexical metaphor but there are five primary types which are dealt with most: allegorical, absolute, mixed, extended, and dead metaphors.
Allegory is a metaphor that employs an extended story illustrating the comparison between two things using symbols rather than explicit words. An allegory in literature often presents the overt elements of a given story along with subtle, nuanced commentary for other events that the author wishes to show an equivalency with. Absolute metaphor, compared with other types, cannot be obfuscated or reduced in any way. An absolute metaphor presents a simple equivalency, such as light standing for knowledge or snow indicating purity.
Absolute metaphors can be symbolic or literal, and they differ from other types of metaphors in that they cannot be replaced by other metaphoric constructions. Mixed metaphor is one of the most common types of metaphors, yet they may be difficult to understand. A mixed metaphor is the blending of two contradictory elements that are completely inconsistent in type. The symbolic meaning of the comparison is still conveyed.
Sometimes the mixed metaphor can be employed intentionally for effect. For example, "There's no place like a home on the range" blends two well-known idioms. Extended metaphor presents a complex comparison with multiple objects. It compares a primary object with a symbolic object, then compares secondary objects connected to the primary with other elements of the symbolic object.
For example, Shakespear’s famous "All the world's a stage, And the men and women merely players" is an extended metaphor, in which the "world" and the "stage" act as the primary objects, while "we" and "players" represent the secondary objects.