Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphors in British and American Political Speeches : A Systemic Functional Approach

Abstract

The thesis aims to investigate the similarities and differences in the employment of interpersonal grammatical metaphors (IGMs) in political speeches (PSs) by British politicians (Bps) and American politicians (Aps) regarding their semantic categories and pragmatic functions. In order to conduct the study, 112 speeches delivered by American and British politicians from 1975 to 2011 from the internet and newspapers are collected then classified into two groups: American political speeches (APS) and British political speeches (BPS) to build two research corpora. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted on the basis of corpus- based method in collecting the data.