A Contrastive Study On Nominalization In Headline Phrases Between English And Chinese News Reports

Chinese people are eager to know and to be known by the outside world since reform and opening-up, and news media play very important role in information exchange between China and the outside world, each day a large amount of information is transmitted by both English and Chinese news reports. Headline is the essential part of news reporting. It is often put at the top of a newspaper article, and functions to attract the reader's attention, or to summarize the story. Nominalization, a salient feature of human languages, is not only a morphological (lexical) process but also a syntactical (grammatical) process, focusing on the"function"of the elements in clause.English and Chinese news headlines show great deviations in its use. From the perspective of grammatical metaphor, this thesis aims to explore the changes of ideational, interpersonal and textual functions realized by Chinese and English nominalizations on the basis of system-functional grammar. This study aims to conduct a contrastive analysis of linguistic characteristics of English and Chinese headlines in terms of nominalization by analyzing a number of local news reports of some Chinese and English newspapers, namely, People's Daily,Xinhua Daily, China Youth, Xinmin Evening Newspaper, The Guardian, The Times, The Washington Post, and U.S.A. Today. The author selects 320 headline phrases, among which 160 are written in Chinese and the other 160 in English, ranging from business news, sports news, and political news to entertainment news. With the help of SPSS, Computer C++ and handpicking, different aspects of nominalization are explored. The thesis concludes that (1) Nominalization is a distinguishing stylistic feature of headline phrases, and both English and Chinese use nominalization on political and business pages more frequent than on entertainment and sports pages. (2) The fives types of nominalization have the same frequency: NT2, NT1, NT5, NT4, and the last one is NT3. (3) English and Chinese have the same tendency of verbal, mental, behavioral, relational, existential and material process transference. (4) Nominalization is concise and formal in ideational metafunction, and it is objective and cohesive in both interpersonal and textual functions.