The Relationship Between Nominalization And Formality Of English In Written Texts From A Functional Perspective

Halliday's theory of grammatical metaphor not only opens up a whole new realm of study on metaphor, but contributes to the development of linguistics as well. Many western linguists have paid much attention to this theory and applied it in many fields. However, in China, the study of grammatical metaphor is just at a preliminary stage, and even seldom seen the study of stylistic variations on the basis of the theory of grammatical metaphor. This paper purports to explore into the theory and then apply it in the study of stylistic variations of texts.The purpose of this thesis is, as the title indicates, to analyze the relationship between nominalization and formality in English written texts. The whole thesis consists of six parts.Part I presents a brief introduction to stylistic variation and nominalization, and then states the writing purpose of this thesis.A classical issue in the study of language is the measurement of stylistic variation. Systemic-functional linguistics maintains that the formal features of a text are closely related to grammatical metaphors. Thus, as a major resource for creating grammatical metaphors, nominalization is also, to some extent, related to text formality. It will be helpful for English teaching and learning as well for the practice of translating in China to make clear about the relationship between nominalization and text formality. However, the work has rarely been done so far. So in this paper, the author attempts to make a tentative study of this topic.Part II is a brief discussion of formality of language and its measurement.Formality is a continuum. The degree of text formality can be demonstrated by the selection of words and grammatical structures. Systemic-functional linguists maintain that the frequency of the occurrence of nominalization indicates the formality degree of a text.Part III is an exploration into nominalization from a functional perspective, focusing on the definition, the nature, the semantic feature andthe detection of nominalization.Nominalization is a type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. the use of a nominal form to express a process meaning (congruently worded as verbs) or a property meaning (congruently worded as adjectives). Nominalized structures are of double semantic features, and this provides the basis for the detection of them.Part IV expounds the relationship between nominalization and text formality.Nominalization is the basic characteristic of English written texts and is applied, more or less, in different functional varieties. The application of nominalization makes the texts more formal, more solemn and more objective. Thus, the frequency of the occurrence of nominalization in a text may indicate its degree of formality.Part V explores the relationship between nominalization and formality with specific reference to scientific writings.Texts of two scientific subgenres, the scientific literatures and the popular science articles which differ in degree of formality, are selected and investigated here. The result of the comparative study shows that the frequency of the occurrence of nominalization can be seen as an indicator of degree of text formality.Part VI is the conclusion.The theoretical analysis, together with the practical investigation suggest that the application of nominalization is closely related to the formality degree of the texts. It is feasible to predict the formality degree of a text in the light of the frequency of the occurrence of nominalization.At the end of the paper, the author points out that this thesis is a tentative study of stylistic variations from a functional perspective. Much work needs to be done in this respect in the future.