A Corpus-Based Study On Nominalizations In The Belt And Road Initiative Discourses

As of 2013,China launched the grand initiative of Belt and Road to the world.Over the past nine years,the construction of it has continued to be advanced and the achievements have exceeded expectations.The values and development outlooks reflected by it meet the requirements of building a community with a shared future for mankind,as well as the aspirations of countries along the route to share development opportunities.At the same time,it shows the thinking and executive force of an oriental power.Language communication is the foundation of all other aspects of Belt and Road construction.The Belt and Road initiative discourses undertake the mission of delivering the tangible achievements of Belt and Road construction to the world community.They are carriers to promote China’s unique development concepts and tell the world what is happening in China.The large distribution of nominalizations in the discourses reflects their conformity with these goals.Nominalization is an object that has been widely studied for decades,but existing researches focus more on its structural features and cognitive attributes and less based on its usage and significance.And compared with academic discourses and scientific discourses,it seems like that there is less research focused on nominalizations in political discourses.On the basis of the current research situation,this study takes nominalization as the research object,choosing research perspective from systemic functional linguistics based on the self-built Belt and Road initiative discourses corpus.The following aspects will be studied:(1)What are the distribution features of nominalizations in the Belt and Road initiative discourses?(2)What are the linguistic features of nominalizations in the Belt and Road initiative discourses?(3)What functions are achieved through the use of nominalizations in the Belt and Road initiative discourses?This thesis selects a total of thirty official documents of Chinese Party and Government on the Belt and Road initiative published from March 2015 to March2021 on the Belt and Road Portal.A combination of quantitative and qualitative approach is adopted to get the statistical results on the types,frequencies and linguistic features of nominalizations in the Belt and Road initiative discourses and to analyze the functions of nominalizations inthe discoursesfrom the perspective of the metafunction theory in systemic functional linguistics with the help of several software of corpus such as Text Editor5.0,Corpus Word Parser,Ant Conc 3.4.3 and Anno Tool.The research results are as follows:(1)As for the distribution features of nominalizations in the Belt and Road initiative discourses,after the identification and classification,we find nominalizations of process and nominalizations of quality take the majority accounting for 96.18% together of all the nominalizations.And nominalizations of process are far more than other types appearing for 1537 times,reaching 83.80%.When it comes to the constituting ways of nominalizations of process,conversion ones accounting for 92.97% as a result of Chinese being an isolating language,the way of derivation is used less than the direct change of word’s parts of speech and the use of multi-categories words.Following thenominalizationsof process,the nominalizations of quality appear for 227 times,accounting for 12.38%in all kinds of nominalizations.And the constituting way of nominalizations of quality assumes a different situation;the number of derivational ones far exceeds the conversion ones.This can be attributed to suffixes are more likely to form words with adjectives in Chinese.(2)In terms of the linguistic features of nominalizations in the corpus,collocation is the first aspect we concern about.This research finds most of nominalizations have noun pre-modifiers.Then when it comes to verb modifiers,most of the verbs are capable with the meaning of strengthen which shows the future direction of Belt and Road arrangements.Besides the use of nominalizations increases the discourse lexical density and reduces the grammatical complexity.(3)The use of nominalizations contributes to the realization of three metafunctions.We can find the deployments of them qualify the process become clear goals that can be pursued,remove the modal expressions so make the discourses to be unquestionable,enable the information in discourses to be closely linked,and so on.To conclude,nominalizations makethe Belt and Road initiative discourses achieve the effects of:conciseness,formality,objectivity and cohesiveness.From the aspect of systemic functional linguistics,this thesis analyzes how nominalizations construct the Belt and Road initiative discourses and discusses the function of them.This study enriches the research on Belt and Road construction and improves the language research ability on hot issues at home and abroad.The research results help to strengthen the creativity of Belt and Road initiative discourses and also contribute to understand Belt and Road construction.It is also instructive to language teaching.