Constructing Reality through Metaphorizing Processes in Wartime Reporting.

This paper considers the relationship between the "context of a situation" and the "metaphorically construed" reality within the transitivity paradigm of Systemic Functional Grammar. The research employed the transitivity model advanced by K. Davidse (1992) to examine the discourse of Japanese wartime (World War II) reporting in Japanese newspapers from the perspective of grammatical metaphor. First, the context of situation encoded in the text is introduced, including a brief history of the Pacific War and a description of the situation of the wartime press. Also discussed is a description of English-language newspapers in wartime Japan, which are used as data for the study. Section 2 explains the model of the transitivity paradigm, putting special emphasis on the metaphorization of processes in the paradigm. In section 3, the theoretical model is applied to the analysis of newspaper texts to demonstrate how transitivity processes are metaphorized for the purpose of obfuscation. This section also: (a) shows how the transitivity process of expressing death is metaphorized as euphemism in wartime discourse by comparing it with how it is manifested in peacetime discourse; and (b) examines transitivity patterns from a diachronic perspective, comparing texts from different stages of the war. The paper concludes that where the necessity for propagandistic discourse is greater, the metaphorization of processes increases. (Contains 33 references.) (NAV)