A Corpus-based Analysis Of Nominalization Structures And Its Ideational Functions In EST

This thesis focuses on the research about nominalization that is an important feature of English for Science and Technology (EST). On the basis of Halliday's theory on Grammatical Metaphor and Nominalization, and the four forms of verbal nouns, including actions nouns, verbal nouns, gerunds and infinitives, the structures and the ideational functions of nominalizations in EST genre are summarized by searching the EST corpus and analyzing the modifiers of nominal groups. Corpus is used as the research method for this study, including 120 foreign articles searched from foreign countries'scientific and technological magazines on the Internet, such as Computer, Computer Digital Techniques, Chemistry of Natural Compounds and Journal of Energy Engineering, etc. The aim of this study is to prove that the form of"noun/nouns + of"groups is one of the significant features in EST genre by the concordance results of corpus, and then to provide the structures and ideational functions to understand and learn EST genre conveniently.The concordance results of the form"noun/nouns + of"takes the largest numbers in the four types of nominalizations in the EST corpus. It is the first major finding in this study after searching the EST corpus. Then the structures of the form"noun/nouns + of"are summarized into three types: The subjetc-predicate structure, The Transitive verb-object structure and The predicate-adverbial structure. The summary and analysis of the structures of nominalizations are to make the EST genre understood easily. The last finding of this study is the analysis of the ideational functions of nominalizations in EST genres. In other words, the process to analyze the ideational functions of nominalizations is the one in which the reasons why the form"noun/nouns +of"appears largely in EST genres and why the EST genres are so abstract and hard to read and understand with this form in EST genres are discussed. As the results of the discussion, two aspects of reasons are shown: Lexical density and Rank shift theory.The data support the following conclusions: the form of"noun/nouns + of"is one of the significant features in EST genres. There are two main reasons explored in this thesis: 1) After being nominalized, the processes presented by verbs will be shown by the form of"noun/nouns + of". As a restul, the Lexical density increases and the structures of sentence are more complex. The information included in the sentence will also enhance because of the more complex structures. As a summary, more forms of"noun/nouns + of"increase the difficulty of EST genres. That is one of the reasons why EST genres are hard to understand. 2) After the clauses are"packed"into"noun + of"groups, which is one of the important ways to make the EST genres presented exactly and briefly, the abstraction of EST genres will be increased.