The Study Of Nominalization In English News Discourse Based On Systemic-functional Grammar

Nominalization is a very widespread phenomenon in English news discourse. Theuse of nominalization can make the discourse more formal and objective. According toMatthews, nominalization is any process by which either a noun or a syntactic unitfunctioning as a noun phrase is derived from any other kinds of unit such as a verb or anadjective (1997). Jespersen (1937) remarks that the use of nominalization enables us toavoid many sloppy expressions because it expresses the meaning which originally has tobe expressed by clauses and it also enables us to add descriptive elements in the shape ofmodifier which is difficult to add to the verbs in the shape of descriptive adverbs.The study of nominalization can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle era inancient Greece, who classify words into two parts of speech: nominal constituents andverbal constituents and have discussed transformation between noun and verb. Thenresearches on nominalization have been conducted from multi-perspective.Transformational-generative linguistics have a clear classification of nominalization basedon the form of nominalization. Systemic-functional grammar’s study for nominalization ismore thorough and more systemic, explaining nominalization from the perspective ofgrammatical metaphor (Halliday,1994). Cognitive linguistics regards the process ofnominalization as the ideational process and Langacker classifies nominalization in hisbook Foundation of Cognitive Grammar, which can be regarded as the basic study ofnominalization (1991).Based on the previous researches and theory of nominalization, it is obvious thatnominalization is one of the typical features of news discourse. The thesis is an attempt toexplore the characteristics of nominalization in both technological and political newsdiscourse and inquire into the functions of nominalization and the factors influencing theuse of nominalization in them. The present research is intended to do an analysis ofnominalization in news discourse from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar. The corpus is selected from China Daily, Los Angeles, The Guardian and USAToday. These selected news discourses include technological and political news.Data analysis shows that nominalization can be used to achieve the functions ofeconomy, impersonalization, objectivity, cohesion, conciseness and formality. Thefrequency of nominalization is different in the two kinds of news discourses, which are42%and21.6%respectively. Different functions account for different percentages intechnological and political news discourses. Among the various functions ofnominalization listed above, functions like economy, conciseness and cohesion can befound in both technological and political news discourses. The function of objectivity andformality take a higher percentage in technological news discourse than that of in politicalnews discourse. The function of impersonalization is more important for political newsthan for technological news discourse. The reasons for the use of nominalization areintralinguistic factors (cohesion, reference and format) and extralinguistic factors(informing, description and narration).