A Study On Nominalization And Its Meta-functions In Abstracts Of Academic Journal Articles

Nominalization refers to the phenomenon that verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech are changed into nominals. Nominalization has been the research focus of linguists all over the world. Halliday makes outstanding contributions to the study of nominalization. He regards nominalization as the most powerful means in the realization of grammatical metaphor. In addition, nominalization, thanks to its formal, objective, and accurate features, has a wide application in many genres, including academic discourse.is a key component in academic journal articles. As for the content, it should present the aim, method and results of the article. In terms of structure, it should be logical and concise. To a large degree, abstract is the determining factor in terms of the quality of an article. Moreover, it influences readers’ intention to move on to the body part of an article.As an important form of grammatical metaphor, nominalization is widespread in abstracts of academic journal articles. The thesis is under the theoretical framework of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor and meta-functions in systemic functional grammar. 60 abstracts are selected from the academic journal articles published in SSCI from 2014 to 2015. The authors of these articles are all native English speakers. The thesis aims to find out the frequency of the five types of nominalization, their syntactic features and meta-functions in these abstracts of academic journal articles.The results show that nominalization owns unique features and functions in abstracts of academic journal articles. It turns out that nominalization of process occupies the highest percentage, followed by nominalization of quality. The other three types seldom occur. As for the syntactic structure, nominalization occurs in nominal groups most frequently. Only several ones are employed in prepositional and verbal groups. The most common collocation with nominalization is “N+of”.The meta-functions of nominalization are elaborated on from three aspects. Ideationally, nominalization helps to enhance economy and preciseness in abstracts and offers a possibility to form technical terms. Interpersonally, the concealment of mood, modality and appraisal in the course of nominalization makes the expressions impersonal, non-negotiable and factual so as to achieve the effect of objectivity. Textually, Nominalization plays a significant role in realizing information focus shifting, promoting smooth transition and integrating multiple variables.In short, through the analysis of the characteristics and meta-functions of nominalization in abstracts of academic journal articles, this article is supposed to provide some insights on the students’ writing of abstracts and the teachers’ guidance of abstracts, and to help the contrastive analysis of nominalization among different languages and the translation of nominalization between English and Chinese. Furthermore, the author hopes that this study can provide valuable and reliable references to the interpretation of meta-functions of nominalization in other genres of discourses.