The Analysis Of Nominalization And Its Interpretation In Chinese Press Conference Discourse

In recent years, the press conferences held by the Chinese government draw more international attention than before. As a result, press conference (PC) discourse becomes a new research focus. PC discourse is a kind of political discourse whose language is formal and objective and the content is informative. Under the framework of systemic-functional linguistics, the present study makes effort to analyze the nominalization in Chinese press conference discourse and its corresponding English interpretation.The author chooses 30 pieces Chinese PC discourses and their English renditions, among which 11 pieces are from Chinese leaders'important press conferences in recent years and 19 pieces from Chinese Foreign Ministry's web site. Based on Halliday's study of grammatical metaphor, this thesis makes a research on the forms of nominalization in PC discourses. With a comparative analysis of the nominalized shift from the congruent forms to the incongruent forms, the author tries to find out how nominalization contributes to achieve the effects of formality, simplicity, objectivity and authority, she also analyzes how the press conference discourses realize condensation of information, and emphasis and cohesion of structure by nominalization within the range of the three metafunctions.The thesis gives advice for interpreting nominalization as well. With plenty of examples, based on the linguistic differences between Chinese and English, the author gives some measures for interpreting—using corresponding nominalized forms or non-equivalent nominalizations. It is hoped that the thesis could contribute to a better understanding to nominalization in PC discourse and its interpretation.