| Nominalization is a very common phenomenon in English and one of the basic traits of human languages.Many scholars have studied it from different perspectives and obtained different conclusions.Nominalization is considered to be the single most powerful resource for grammatical metaphor (Halliday,2000). Through nominalizing, processes and properties, whose congruent forms are verbs and adjectives, arereworded incongruently as nouns functioning as Thing in the nominal group. Nominalization occurs abundantlyfor its important and prominent features in English news discourse that people are widely exposed to in theirdaily life. As there are different registers in news discourse, this thesis mainly chooses five types, includingpolitical, business, scientific and technical, cultural and sports news. Now what is the frequency ofnominalization in each register? Based on the theory of grammatical metaphor and three metafunctions oflanguage under the framework of Systemic-Functional Grammar, this thesis tries to explore this question andinvestigate how nominalization is used in English news discourse to realize three metafunctions, includingideational, interpersonal, and textual functions.The research materials are selected randomly from five prestigious newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, theGuardian and the Independent in Britain; Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in America, fifty reportsin total from the five registers. The research adopts quantitative, qualitative and comparative methods. Firstly, bya quantitative and comparative study, the frequency of nominalization in each register of news discourse iscalculated. It’s found that the number of nominalization transferred from process to entity, i.e. verbalnominalization is much larger than that transferred from quality to entity, i.e. adjective nominalization. And theoccurrence of nominalization varies according to the different registers of news discourse. Then, by qualitativestudy, the thesis mainly analyses the metafunctions of nominalization in English news discourse.The analysis of the data has the following major findings:As for the ideational one, nominalization in news discourse achieves the functions of the transference fromcongruence to incongruence; semantic expansion; densification and formality. As a form of grammaticalmetaphor, nominalization transferred from process and property is more complex in meaning than its congruentexpression by dual semantic choice. And it owns the features of a noun while remaining certain characteristics ofa verb. Therefore, nominalization can cause the effect of semantic expansion. Meanwhile, nominalization canrealize lexical densification in the way that it packs lexical items densely into a nominal construction. Besides, itachieves the function of formality with the assistance of the lexical density, because lexical density is considered to be a norm of the extent of formality.As for the interpersonal one, nominalization in news discourse realizes the function of objectivity andnon-negotiability. In mood system, the Subject and Finite typically disappear during the process of nominalizing.Nominalization becomes fossilized, impersonalized and unbiased without the restrictions of time and subject. Inmodality system, the source of modality can be concealed by nominalizing, thus subjective opinions can bereported in a more implicit and objective way, causing the effect of non-negotiability.As for the textual function, nominalization in news discourse can serve as a powerful cohesive tie toachieve the aim of textual cohesion by creating the relations between Theme and Rheme, i.e. Theme-Rhemeprogression in which nominalization refers back to the process, a clause or a group of clauses of the precedingtext and serves as the starting point of the next sentence. The process develops progressively until forming ameaningful text.Due to these functions, nominalization is abundantly employed in news discourse and in turn becomes adistinct feature of news discourse.This study explores nominalization in English news discourse and the three metafunctions, which enablesus to have a more comprehensive understanding and interpreting of nominalization and benefits us to improvethe writing and reading skills to some extent, as nominalization is a powerful resource to create grammaticalmetaphor, which provides us with more synonymous expressions to choose and better acquisition of language. |
PDF Full Text Request