On Nominalizations In Abstracts Of Scientific Theses

In the modern world, science and technology develop rapidly and give birth to richresearch fruits. As a communication media, English for science and technology playsan important role in it. More and more research results are realized by English. InChina, the research articles are asked to have English abstracts. As the essence of theresearch article, an abstract is an important genre which serves as a time-saving devicefor readers’ quickly capturing the main points of the whole paper, and by means ofwhich the writers can keep up with advances in their fields and promote their newknowledge within academic community. There are large amount of nominalization inscientific abstracts. Nominalization is a process of using nouns to express the processor thing that should be described by verbs and adjectives congruently. On this account,this thesis intends to explore the phenomena of nominalization in scientific abstracts,especially the functions of nominalization from the approach of FunctionalGrammatical Theory.This thesis firstly summarizes the studies on nominalization and scientificabstracts. Then it elaborates the theoretical foundation of the study---FunctionalGrammatical Metaphor. Based on the representation of three meta-functions, the thesisdescribes Halliday’s13types of grammatical metaphor.On the basis of Functional Grammatical Metaphor, this thesis mainly analyzes theapplication of nominalization in scientific abstracts by taking quantitive analyzingmethod. After analyzing the data of nominalization in30English scientific abstracts,this thesis inquires into the functions of nominalization from the functional andstylistic perspective. There are three main findings:1. Nominalization is the principalform of grammatical metaphors in the abstracts of scientific theses;2. In scientificabstracts, a large amount of information expressed by clauses is packed or condensedinto nouns or nominal groups through grammatical metaphors in order to make theclauses with more succinct structures and abundant information.3. Nominalizationmakes scientific discourse concise, prominent, objective and cohesive from the stylistic perspective, it also has the function of categorizing, the function of de-personalization,and the function of reasoning on scientific abstracts.This thesis is intended to throw some light on the learning of scientific discourse.When reading scientific English, readers should pay more attention to nominalizations,which may be helpful to understand those long and complicated sentences. Whilewriting scientific English, authors would bear in mind that nominalization is frequentlyused in scientific discourse. Scientific writers should try their best to make the essaysconcise, objective, persuasive and cohesive.