A Systemic-Functional Analysis Of Nominalization

Nominalization is by no means a new topic. The human cognition of nominalization has undergone a gradual process. Among different linguistic schools that address such a phenomenon—structural school, generative school, cognitive school and systemic-functional school—in my personal view, only systemic-functional school provides a general theoretical framework to situate the concrete linguistic analysis of nominalization. Its perspective on nominalization is closely tied up with the concept of grammatical metaphor (GM): nominalization can be defined as the process by which non-nominal structural elements are made to function as nominal elements and can also refer to any item that has been 'transcategorized' from, for instance, verb to noun class; it is the single most powerful resource for making grammatical metaphor.However, nominalizations are described by systemic-functional linguists as 'ideational' metaphors. The relationship between nominalization and interpersonal or textual metaphor, though mentioned by some scholars such as Thompson and Martin, is not studied thoroughly. This thesis is an attempt to prove the close relationship between nominalization and ideational, interpersonal and textual metaphors and to provide a comprehensive picture of nominalization within the systemic-functional framework.The thesis first introduces in detail the theory of grammatical metaphor, and then it investigates how nominalization realizes the three general kinds of metaphors—ideational metaphor, interpersonal metaphor and textual metaphor. Furthermore, it tries to systematically study the features and functions of nominalization. Nominalization not only includes verbal and adjectival nominalization but includes conjunctional, adverbial and prepositional ones. All these types involve transference in lexicogrammar from higher rank to lower rank, accompanying with a change of lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. As far as the functions of nominalization are concerned, textual function attracts the widest attention. Nominalization and textual cohesion, its connection with language objectivity and ideology, with language qualification and quantification are defined. The analysis of the functions forms a solid theoretical basis for text analysis and text translation.