| A study of Application of Nominalization in Internet News HeadlinesNewspaper as an old press media has existed for very long time and it has been having great influence on people’s lives. But with the rapid development of the internet technology, more and more people are tending to use computer to get information rather than reading newspaper, in other words, people are more likely to read internet news. Internet news is also called on-line news. Internet news is increasingly drawing people’s attention because it is more convenient, faster and easier to gain the information.According to the research done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in the USA,the results indicate that over60%of American news paper had its own website in2000. Internet news has gained plenty of readers who enjoy reading news on line due to its high speed, convenience and easiness to get the key point. Furthermore, internet news is more interesting and amusing as there are videos and pictures in the body part. Internet news is mainly consisted of two parts:headline and body part. Traditional news headline and body part are combined in one page. However, the internet news headline is completely independent from the body part and the body part can be read only after the headline is clicked first, in other words, the headline directly determines click rates. It is not hard to see that the internet news headline plays a very significant role in gaining clicks. And there is an old saying: headline is the eye of the whole internet news. So, editors are working on how to write good internet news headlines to attract more readers. Due to the importance of internet news headline, it has drawn much attention from people from all walks, especially editors and linguists. According to current documents, it can be seen that there are plenty of works about internet news headlines and they have gained valuable results.Internet technology makes the world smaller and smaller, even it is regarded as a world village. People all over the world are getting close to each other with the help of Internet. Hence, English as a language media is very useful and it is even regarded as world language when globalization spreads every corner of the world. Lots of people from different countries are learning English. Reading English news is one way of improving their comprehension ability and reading ability. Moreover, internet news is easier to read and more interesting compared with traditional newspaper because pictures or flashes are usually presented next to the body part. Internet news headlines as the objects of this paper will be studied in details. And the research materials in this paper are internet news headlines from four famous and influential on-line newspapers in American. All internet news headlines are collected from their official websites to ensure the validity.Nominalization is a common phenomenon of language. English and Chinese are languages full of nominalization phenomena. In western countries, plenty of researches on English nominalization have been done and new findings are published from time to time. In recent years, research on nominalization in Chinese has been a hot issue. Although scholars in China have made great efforts in the study of Chinese nominalization and have gained valuable results, there is no famous and influential works about nominalization published compared with western countries since they have started at a very early time. Therefore, this paper expounds the development history of nominalization. Due to various language schools in western countries, researches on nominalization are carried out variously, thus different studying points of view and studying results on nominalization are illustrated in this paper so as to provide readers with a general view on it. So far, there isn’t a specific definition of nominalization accepted by all, thus several influential ones are listed in the paper. In western countries, strenuous study of nominalization can be traced back to Aristotle although he did not propose the term nominalization. Then, it is Jespersen who provided us with comparatively full and accurate explanations of nominalization. His ideas and thoughts inspired Halliday and Chomsky and they have made great contribution to nominalization study. Halliday firstly proposed grammatical metaphor theory and studied nominalization with ideational metaphor. He also made the clear classification of nominalization in his book. Two subcategories are included in grammatical metaphor:ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. And he illustrated13modes of expression to make metaphor. Among them, nominalization is a quite proficient method to create metaphor. There are four types out of13related to nominalization thus nominalization is considered as the most important way to realize metaphor. Halliday laid the solid foundation for the following study of nominalization although his research theory is still controversial. Nominalization is applied in many respects such as science discourse and advertisement and it has several functions. According to current documents, researches on nominalization and internet news headlines can be found separately, however, it is barely to see the research studying these two subjects together. Therefore, this paper combines nominalization and internet news headlines together to probe a new way. To be exact, it is a study of the application of nominalization in internet news headlines.This paper focuses on the application of nominalization in internet news, trying to find out which type of internet news headlines applies nominalization most and what functions and inadequacies it has. The paper is composed by five parts. First part is the introduction of the research background. A brief introduction of the research questions and the layout of the thesis are listed in this part. Second chapter is literature review of nominalization elaborating the development history of nominalization and various studying points of view by different language schools. Furthermore, full and detailed illustration of nominalization by Halliday is included in this part as it is used as instructive theory of this paper. Next part provides terms, research questions and methodology of the paper. It details the research methods used in this paper and how the research is designed. Then, data collection and analysis, major findings and discussion are expounded in this part. Finally, the conclusion will be drawn. In this paper, the applied nominalization theory is from Halliday. As for the internet news headlines, they are collected from the famous and influential American internet newspapers. Due to the limitation of this paper, only four types of news headlines are chosen as research subjects and they are political, business, cultural and sports news headlines.400news headlines in all are collected. In order to ensure the credibility, all of on-line news headlines are collected randomly. |
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