Nominalization In English News Report-From The Perspetive Of Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday has put forward the grammatical metaphor (GM) for the first time. GM, in the framework of systemic-functional grammar, essentially refers to the shifting from congruency to incongurency. The main research of GM by Halliday focuses on the scientific and technological discourse, in which GM is classified into thirteen types according to their semantic function shift. However five types of them belong to nominalization based on systemic-functional grammar. Nominalization refers to the fact that any element or group of elements shifts to function as noun or noun group in a clause which includes nominalized adjectives, verbs, clauses (finite or non-finite) and so on (Halliday, 2000: 352) Nevertheless Halliday considers nominalization as one of the most powerful resources in the realization of GM. Nominalization is the main alternative for meaning generation and interpretation, and symbolizes human's thinginess-oriented cognition. However, as a sub-type of GM, it is mentioned only in a simple way in GM study, therefore, there is a need for further study of nominalization for other discourse analysis.News reports are characterized by objectivity, neutrality and vividness etc., in which large quantities of nominalizations are involved. This study, on the basis of Halliday's GM theory in scientific and technological research, makes an attempt to explore nominalization in the discourse of English news report, involving its classification, construal mechanism and consistent three metafunctions. In addition, it tries to testify the feasibility of Halliday's GM theory applied in news discourse.This thesis applies Halliday's GM theory to analyzing nominalization, its shifting mechanism and metafunctions in English news reports. The author attempts to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to study the shifting mechanism and metafunctions in relation to each nominalization type from the data collected from 30 English news reports, which are from the British newspaper The Times concerning Chinese politics and economy. To be more specific, the purpose of this study is to describe the distribution of the five nominalization types in English news reports (ENRs), present shifting mechanism in relation to each nominalization type in ENRs, and interpret the metafunctions in relation to each nominalization type in the light of shifting mechanism in ENRs.Research will be conducted via the following steps:First the author tries to classify nominalization into five types according to GM theory. They are different transference to entity respectively from process, quality, zero, circumstance and relator. Secondly, the study describes the distribution of the five nominalization types. Statistics shows that the highest frequency occurs in the process-entity transference, then followed with quality-entity and zero-entity transference, last with circumstance-entity and relator-entity transference.Further, the author presents the shifting mechanism in relation to each nominalization type. It is found that each nominalization type is the incongruent realization between the semantic and lexicogrammatical levels. Such incongruency could be specifically realized in semantic function transference at semantic level, and in lexical transformation at lexicogrammatical level.Finally, the study interprets the metafunctions in relation to nominalization types. Analyses show that the process-entity transference and quality-entity transference are two typical nominalization types with the highest frequency. Their ideational functions deal with lexical density, double semantic features and descriptive potential; the interpersonal functions involve objectivity and implication; and the textual functions include compactness, information focus shifting and anaphoric reference. And the last three types concerning transference of zero, circumstance and relator mainly perform the functions of lexical density and compactness.This study expands the research scope of nominalization from scientific and technical discourses to the news discourse, further has testified the feasibility of Halliday's GM theory in applied ENR. Furthermore, it provides us with a better and insightful understanding of nominalization in ENR and may be beneficial for news writing.