| The use of nominalization is universal in written English, especially in English for Science and Technology. Functional linguists believe nominalization as one of the primary means of creating grammatical metaphor and it affects the expression of written English. Scientific article has the features of formality, concision and discourse coherence in which nominalization functions a lot. This thesis is based on the theory of grammatical metaphor of Halliday's systemic functional grammar to discuss functions of nominalization in scientific academic articles. Moreover, It would be helpful to understand the author, esp. English-native speaker, how nominalization distributed in each part of scientific articles and its performance and tendency. It would contribute a lot to Chinese author in English thesis writing. However, the domestic research in this aspect is not sufficient and systematic and persuasive. The author is aiming to have a tentative discussion.With a scientific methodology of corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study, and a theoretical framework based on Grammatical Metaphor Theory of the System of Functional Grammar, this paper has investigated the use of nominalization in self-built corpus of natural scientific academic articles and made an overall analysis. And the results of this study are expected to provide some valuable reference for the pedagogy of English for Academic Purposes and scientific scholars. The study consists of qualitative and statistic analysis and the former one emphasize on how nominalization realize ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. It also explores impacts of nominalization to text. The occurrence and application of nominalization is a way to reconstruct human experience world and the appropriate use can add formality to the text. It could describe clearly the complexity of the relationship to make articles much more objectivity and authority. That is the reason why nominalization prevails. It is related to the features of register and is critical to the realization of the three metafunctions. Secondly, the thesis tends to analyze nominalization in data to make a statistic list by using WordSmith statistic software. The statistic result reveals distribution feature in text and different parts of text and the comparison of the statistic results shows that there are differences in the four sections of scientific articles: abstract, introduction, body and conclusion. MI score is used to calculate the significant collocation between nominalization and high-frequency used words and results shows the degree of significant collocation is lower than we have hypothesized. Nominalization is also related to register. It disguises overt processes and makes use of the resources available to nouns to ensure scientific discourse coherent. The author attributes the distinction inside discourses to meaning choice. It is of great value and importance to explore nominalization for us to have a better understanding of the nature of language of science and technology and its teaching. |
PDF Full Text Request