A Study Of Nominalization In Business English Correspondence

Nominalization is a very common phenomenon in English, especially in written English. The great employment of nominalization makes discourse more formal and objective. According to the present author’s observation, the frequency of employment of nominalization in business English correspondence is rather high and nominalization is wildly used in the business activities and communication. Therefore, this thesis analyzes the phenomenon of nominalization in business English correspondence, probes the formation characteristics and discourse functions of nominalization and brings about some implications concerned.The theory applied in this thesis is Halliday’s (1985) nominalization theory under the framework of grammatical metaphor. Halliday defines nominalization as "the process in which nouns are formed from corresponding verbs and adjectives which reflect’process’and’attribute’respectively". Halliday initially classifies grammatical metaphor into ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor. The ideational grammatical metaphor’s major representation is nominalization. Then, Halliday reclassifies grammatical metaphor into thirteen different types, among which nominalization still keeps the most common metaphorical phenomenon. According to Halliday’s (1996) reclassification of grammatical metaphor, this thesis investigates nominalization in business English correspondence at the lexical level and subordinate clausal level, based on the30business letters chosen from some professional business English teaching materials. From the lexical level, nominalization can be divided into de-verbal nominalization, which is realized by adding suffix, zero affix and-ing, and de-adjective nominalization, which is realized also by adding suffix. From the subordinate clausal level, usually the subject clause, object clause and adverbial clause could perform the nominalization transformation. This thesis also analyzes the discourse functions of nominalization in business English correspondence discourse. The great employment of nominalization makes it more concise, formal and coherent. Therefore, if the frequency of the employment of nominalization gets higher, the degree of the formal writing style will also become higher.The following two implications could be concluded from the investigation. Firstly, nominalization has the discourse functions of conciseness, formality and coherence. Therefore, the large employment of nominalization in business English correspondence shapes the completeness and politeness of the format, coherence of the content and discourse cohesion. Secondly, compared to English, Chinese features on "verb-centered" and its grammar structure is strictly constrained by time order. During the process of translating, the translator may truthfully convey the writer’s purpose and information in the light of "verb-centered" Chinese in order to reach the goals of international business.In all, this thesis analyzes the phenomenon of nominalization in business English correspondence from lexical and subordinate clausal level and its discourse function. This research may provide a new perspective for the study of the language and discourse of business English correspondence and get some implications for translating business English correspondence.