Explorations Into Nominalization In International Political News Reports In English And Chinese Newspapers

This thesis is an analysis of nominalization in international political news reports in English and Chinese newspapers.The significance of the grammatical metaphor theory to systemic-functional linguistics as well as to metaphor studies has been generally acknowledged.According to Halliday(2000)and Thompson(2000),in systemic-functional linguistics grammatical metaphor refers to a metaphorical expression of a meaning through a lexicogrammatical form,which originally evolved to express a more congruent kind of meaning.Halliday (2000)states:"nominalizing is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor." Nominalization is regarded as one of the most prominent features of written and formal languages.Halliday(1996)classifies grammatical metaphor into thirteen types, five of which are nominalizations.Based on the framework of nominalization in grammatical metaphor theory,this thesis at first conducts a statistical analysis of the distribution of five types of nominalization in 40 international political news reports in English and Chinese newspapers,which are chosen at random.Furthermore,functions of nominalization are explored according to the three metafunctions of language,namely, ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The present paper is divided into five chapters:Chapter One gives an introduction to the present research,which outlines the background,the rationale and the significance of this study.Chapter Two is primarily intended to deal with a few nominalization-related problems in preparation for a three-meta functional approach to nominalization in the next two chapters.These problems include the news discourse,grammatical metaphor and nominalization.Chapter Three conducts a statistical analysis of the distribution of the five types of nominalization in international political news reports chosen at random.The statistical results reveal that in the international political news reports in English newspapers the nominalization of verbs occurs the most frequently,the nominalization of adjectives occurs less frequently than that of verbs,and the nominalization of prepositions, conjunctions and "zero" occurs rarely.As in English newspapers,in the international political news reports in Chinese newspapers,nominalization of verbs,also ranks the highest in the frequency of occurrence and the nominalization of prepositions, conjunctions and "zero" occurs rarely.However,in Chinese newspapers,nominalization of adjectives,occurs only once in the samples,which is quite different from the English newspapers.Chapter Four probes the various functions of nominalization,based on the tripartition of metafunctions:ideational,interpersonal and textual.Ideationally, nominalization can perform the function of semantic expansion,conciseness and formality; Interpersonally,nominalization can conceal the time,the space,the participant and the modality to make the expression more objective;Textually,nominalization can make the discourse more cohesive.Chapter Five is a conclusion of this research.It summarizes the major findings of this study,then sketches out the limitations and advances some suggestions for further study.The present study is just a tentative analysis of nominalization in international political news reports in English and Chinese newspapers.On the one hand,there is still no explicit definition of nominalization in Chinese because it is difficult to distinguish the part of speech of a Chinese word.On the other hand,the author attempts to analyze Chinese courses in terms of English theory,and consequently,due to the limitations of her theoretical ability and the research resources available,the findings and conclusions in the thesis are prone to challenges.Challenges often promise opportunities.The author hopes the thesis can provide some insights,as well as questions to help the study on English and Chinese nominalizations go further.