| English is a nominalizing language, and different schools of linguistics have studied nominalization from their own perspectives. Famous linguist of functional grammar, Halliday(1994), says, "In spoken language the ideational content is loosely strung out; in written language, the clausal patterns are typically rather simple; but the ideational content is densely packed in nominal constructions. And it is the written kind of complexity that involves grammatical metaphor." And he further points out that nominalizing is the single most power resource for creating grammatical metaphor. English nominalization on one hand refers to the process or result of forming a noun from a word belonging to another word class, and on the other hand the process or result of deriving a noun phrase by transformation from a finite clause such as their rejection on my complaint from They rejected my complaint. Because this thesis uses corpus-based approach, the investigation is limited to lexical nominalizations.To focus on the functions of nominalization within a theory of functional grammar, four aspects are discussed. They are: textual cohesion, lexical density, lexical conciseness and objectiveness in expression. If the hypothesis is true that compositions of non-English majors are lack of English nominalization, it is self-evident that their compositions are not real written English but speech-like for they lack the features of written English marked by nominalization.Based on this feature of written English, the purpose of the thesis is to study nominalization in Chinese learners' compositions. First of all, a corpus of non-English majors' compositions is established for further contrastive analysis. In addition, the research adopts two corpora: native speakers' written corpus-FLOB and speech corpus-LLC. In each corpus, frequency of nominalization is explored. The concordances are My finder and Wordsmith. Statistic software is Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).The author presents three assumptions: the production of nominalization is correlated with Chinese learners' language proficiency; the frequency of English nominalization in students' compositions is lower than that of native speakers' and different in the preference of forms of nominalization; the frequency of nominalization in written English is higher than that of spoken English. To testify the assumptions, the author first analyzes the practicability of retrieving lexical... |
