A Cognitive Analysis Of Nominalization In English And Chinese Advertising Discourse

Nominalization has always been considered as one important feature of scientific discourse. We can also find much use of it in advertising discourse. This paper takes the English and Chinese cosmetic advertising discourses as the corpus of analysis and tries to explore the similarities and differences of employing the nominal forms between these two languages from a cognitive perspective. The use of nominalizations in English outnumbers that of the nominalized structures in Chinese. There is a common cognitive motivation for the employing of nominal forms between English and Chinese advertising discourses, that is, the conflict between figure-ground theory and the principle of iconicity. This conflict brings forth a mixed effect, in which, on one hand, the verbal or adjectival attributes are still perceivable, and, on the other hand, the nominalized forms derived from verbs or adjectives occupy the salient subject or object position. In this process, some particular attributes of the advertised products are strikingly highlighted. There are some similarities between English and Chinese advertising discourses in encoding effects, such as condensing the information, increasing the authority, non-negotiability and etc.However, the language-specific features of English and Chinese and their restrictions lead to different strategies of employing the nominal forms, such as the morphological changes of English and Chinese, the vagueness of word classes in Chinese, etc.