Nominalization In The Titles Of Academic Articles

Ever since Aristotle, people have been intrigued and baffled by the mystery of metaphor. Researchers from various academic fields have approached metaphor from different perspectives and established a rain of theories of metaphor. Nominalizing is the powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. By this device, process ( congruently worded as verbs ) and properties ( congruently worded as adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as nouns; instead of functioning in clause, as Process of Attribute, they function as Thing in the nominal group.( Halliday,1985). Nowadays, there are a lot of articles on the research of nominalization. But many of them are about the nominalization in English scientific discourse. English scientific discourse is a part of English academic article. This thesis aims to investigate the frequency and cognitive motivation of nominalization in the titles of English academic articles, taking Halliday'concepts of Grammatical Metaphor and Nominalization as the basic theory of this study.The thesis consists of five chapters. In chapter one, a general introduction on the present research is given, including the information about nominalization, the perspective and purposes of the present studies. Chapter two is the theoretical research framework for this study and also introduces the related studies of nominalization; the studies and results from different approaches are introduced and compared. Chapter three is devoted to the empirical study part. It is the methodology, mainly about data collection and data analysis.The writer puts forward the hypotheses that there is a high nominalization frequency in the titles of academic articles. And the data will be analyzed and discussed in detail. Chapter four is about the results and discussion. The last chapter includes the summary of the study, the limitation of the study, and also the suggestions for future studies.