Nominalization In Broadcast News Reporting From The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

The systemic-functional approach to nominalization in the framework of grammatical metaphor was first introduced by M.A.K. Halliday in his monograph "An Introduction to Functional Grammar" in 1985. The notion of grammatical metaphor (GM), developed mainly by Halliday (1994) represents an original and innovative contribution to linguistic theory.This thesis focuses on the use of grammatical metaphor in the form of nominalized processes in the English broadcast news reporting. As a functional variety, broadcast news reporting is lexically and syntactically unique. So far most descriptions of grammatical metaphor in this functional variety are qualitative, lacking in empirical data support. In this thesis, randomly selected news items from VOA were used as data for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Under the theoretical framework of systemic-functional grammar, the concept of grammatical metaphor is discussed with the process transference in transitivity system as a starting point. Thereafter definitions of nominalization and difficulties in identifying examples of nominalized processes are presented. Statistic evidence shows that nominalized processes abound in news items. And some productive nominal suffixes -ion, -ment, -ity, -ness and a special nominal ending -ing are investigated. After the presentation of their distribution frequency, functional explanation of nominalization is elucidated. Nominalization is the main source of grammatical metaphor in news reporting as it is in scientific discourse. Nominalization, a stylistic feature of news reporting, has the rhetorical effects of condensation, thematic connection, backgrounding and parallelism. Moreover, superficial objectification, authors' desired effect of ambiguity and ideology, as well as pragmatic presupposition are secretly achieved by the purposefully used nominalized processes.It is believed that a better understanding of nominalized processes in news reporting can facilitate EFL learners' understanding of English news items and shed some light on journalists' work for news reporting.