| Under the framework of systemic-functional linguistics, adopting the comparative analysis method, the present study makes much effort to demonstrate the nominalization in English and Chinese scientific news discourses. The author chooses 40 scientific news discourses among which twenty are from New York Times on www.nytsyn.com and twenty are from www.people.com.cn. By conducting a statistical analysis of the five types of nominalization that are proposed by Halliday , the thesis is intended to look for the frequency of nominalization, the realization forms of nominalization and on the other hand, to identify the language characteristics and functions of nominalization in both English and Chinese scientific news discourses. The thesis also analyzes how the scientific news discourses realize the objectivity, accuracy and so on by nominalization. Another goal of the comparative study is to prove that nominalizations exist in large number in both English and Chinese scientific news discourses and Halliday's transitivity system and theories of nominalization are applicable to analyze Chinese material.Through the statistical analysis, the author finds there are similarities and differences between nominalizations in English and Chinese scientific news. The nominalizations of process and quality are the main types of nominalization both in English and Chinese, and at the lexical level they are nominalizations of verbs and adjectives. Nominalization is abundant both in English and Chinese scientific news discourses, but their frequencies in the two discourses are different. It is higher in English than that in Chinese. Some reasons for this phenomenon come from the inner system of language. For example, Chinese is a language system that emphasizes the configuration of meaning while English focuses on form. Other reasons are social factors, for example, the influence of politics and economy. The thesis also analyzes the process transference by which many nominalizations are caused. This analysis finds the unexpected result that there is an obvious transference tendency among the six types of processes in forming nominalization. It is mental→verbal→behavioral→relational→existential→material. This rule can be interpreted, combining with Halliday's definitions of the six processes of transitivity system, by the language characteristics of scientific news discourse: objectivity, reality and so on.The author also carries out qualitative study on the collected data. On the basis of Halliday's transitivity structure model, the qualitative study analyzes in detail the formational process of nominalization in English and Chinese scientific news discourses. The purpose of this analysis is to reveal the functions that different nominalizations produce in the discourse. The discovered functions of nominalization are density, conciseness, objectivity, formality, thematic connection, and pragmatic presupposition.At last, the thesis gives a general classification of nominalizations exiting in the corpus at the morphological level. Contrastive study of this in English and Chinese scientific news discourses reveals that there are obvious manifestation forms of nominalizations at the morphological level in English, for it is a kind of derivational language. But in Chinese the manifestation of nominalization at morphological level is dull, for the power of derivation in Chinese is weak. |
PDF Full Text Request