| The newspaper is an important channel to spread information and it contains various contents.The features of newspaper language are objective and concise.The choice of newspaper language may influence the readers passively or negatively,however,western newspaper often report false news about China.Nominalization is a common phenomenon in English.It is often used in English news and has important functions,and the reporters use nominalization to cover ideology and hide some meanings.Previous studies paid more attention to the change of sentence structures that is caused by nominalization.Many empirical researches about nominalization studied the features of nominalization in discourses and nominalization in second language acquisition.However,there are few researches about the functions of nominalization in English news.In some studies,their theoretical evidences are not clear and examples are not convictive.Therefore,this thesis studies these questions:1)What is the frequency of types of nominalization used in English news?2)What is the frequency of functions of nominalization used in English news?3)How are the functions of nominalization realized in English news?This thesis sorts out previous studies to find the theoretical evidences of each function of nominalization.The sources of the data are from three important western newspapers,The Guardians,New York Times and Washington Post.The author downloads seventy social reports from their official websites.Then the study employs qualitative method and quantitative method to analyze and discuss the functions of nominalization in data.The following are the research findings in this study:1)The most frequently used type of nominalization in English News is taking process as a thing.2)The highest percentage of the function of nominalization is textual cohesion.3)The cohesive function of nominalization is realized by theme-rheme form.Packaging clauses or phrase to noun or packaging sentences to clause or phrase are the main methods for nominalization to involve more information in one sentence.From the discussion of examples,this thesis finds that eight functions of nominalization are used in English news,and some of them belong to textual functions and some of them express ideology.The author also concludes that analyzeing the functions of nominalization should combine nominalization with theories,contexts and sentence structures.The significance of the research could be illustrated by the following points.1)The study explains how nominalization realizes functions completely in English news.It can help readers to have a deeper understanding to this language phenomenon.2)Newspaper readers can understand the deep meanings that hide in nominalization and find out the untrue information in China-related reports of western newspaper.3)English learners can employ nominalization in reading and writing appropriately.The deficiencies of this study include less categories and limited data scope.The combination of results explanation and theories need to be strengthened. |
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