| Metaphor has long been attributed to the rhetorical category,which is usually understood as lexical metaphor in a narrow sense.The proposal of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor greatly enriches the theory of metaphor.Halliday’s research on grammatical metaphor is mainly in scientific and technical discourse.Grammatical metaphor is divided into 13 categories according to the transformation of semantic function,and its generating mechanism and pure logical function arc respectively explained.Five of these 13 categories of grammatical metaphor arc concerned with nominalization.The esscnce of grammatical metaphor is the transformation from congruency to incongrucncy.Nominalization refers to any function-oriented transformation of nouns,which is not only confined to the lexicogrammatical level but also emphasizes the shift of sentence functional components at the semantic level.This is greatly different from the transformation of nominalization which is confined to the lexical level in the traditional sense.Scientific American is a popular science magazine in the United States,which started on August 28,1845.It provides a forum to present scientific theories and new scientific discoveries.It is considered to be a popular high-level academic journal,which complements the academic audience of Nature.Based on Halliday’s theory of grammatical metaphor in scientific and technical texts,this thesis intends to study nominalization in Scientific American,and to explore its classification,generating mechanism,function and translation,so as to verify the applicability of Halliday’s theory of grammatical metaphor and how to translate it better.The results show that the shift from process to entity occurs most frequently,and the shift from quality to entity is followed by the shift from circumstance to quality,from relator to entity and from zero to entity.Then,taking the typical sentences in the corpus as an example,this thesis deduces the five types of nominalization in scientific and technical texts in a consistent way,and analyzes the generating mechanism of different types of nominalization respectively.It is concluded that all nominalization is realized by the transformation or shift from semantic function to lexicogrammatical function.Through the analysis of its functions,it is found that although the five types of nominalization overlap in function,each has its own emphasis.The shift from quality to entity and other changes can increase the lexical density,thus making the text more compact and concise.The shift from process to entity will enhance the descriptive ability and interpersonal function,which is mainly manifested in reducing the occurrence of unnecessary subjects and removing modal verbs,thus making the text more objective.The other three types of nominalization,i.e.from environment to entity,from relator to entity and from zero to entity,are mainly used to increase the lexical density and make the text condensed.Although these three types of transformation have relatively low distribution frequency and involve relatively few pure functions,they are also indispensable means for realizing nominalization.Finally,through the analysis of the five types of nominalized translations,it is found that the translator has conversed and deleted some expressions according to the specific situation when translating these contents,so as to reduce the language understanding barriers and make the translation versions more readable.That is,metaphor removal is a common translation method used by professional translators.And the specific translation strategies are word class converting,information adding,information deleting,sentence splitting and restructuring.This thesis further verifies the applicability of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor theory,which enables us to have a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of nominalization in scientific and technical texts,and is also of great help to the writing and translation of scientific and technical texts to a certain degree. |
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