| Nominalization is a common phenomenon in any language including English and it isregarded as the most powerful resource for generating grammatical metaphor, according toHalliday. Through nominalization, one word can have different grammatical categories andexpress different meanings; Jespersen is one of the earliest scholars who put the focus on thestudy of English nominalization. His theory is mainly based on rank，junction and nexuswhich constitute the core of the theory. The verbal nexus-words and predicative nexus-wordsare equivalent to what we call now verbal nominalization and adjective nominalization.Since verbal nominalization is so important and complex in English, it attracts a lot ofattentions from the linguistic schools, such as Structural Linguistics,Transformational-generative Linguistics, Systemic-functional Linguistics and CognitiveLinguistics. Most of them describe the various functional features of nominalization, whilemany scholars have studied nominalization from different perspectives and obtaineddifferent conclusions.Though Jespersen did not introduce the concept of Nominalization directly and histheory is mainly based on rank, junction and nexus which constitute the core of the theory,the verbal nexus-words and predicative nexus-words are equivalent to what we call nowverbal nominalization and adjective nominalization. Moreover, Jespersen’s theory of threeranks also provided the mechanism of rank-shifting, which has become one of the focuses ofthe philosophy of language then and been promoted by Halliday in the study of grammaticalmetaphor. Halliday tries to cover all the rank-shifting with the theory of GrammaticalMetaphor, and he believes that Grammatical Metaphor is a mechanism which works beyondthe stratum of language and thus is imbued with philosophical implications.Although there have been abundant studies on Halliday’s theories of GM andnominalization and Jespersen’s theory of Rank, Nexus and Junction, it lacks the analogicalstudies on the internal relationship between their theories. This fact interested the author to put forward the research and find out the relationship between their theories ofnominalization.As an approach to achieving formality and compactedness, linguists, both overseasand domestic have made some researches on how nominalization help realize formality andcompactedness in English for Special Purpose(ESP), for example, scientific English andmedical English. Though a few scholars made some studies on nominalization in legaldiscourse from the perspective of Halliday’s grammatical metaphor, it can not find out thesimilar studies on how Jespersen’s relative theory works in legal English discourse. As theorigin of Anglo-American legal system, U.K Companies Act is always the model for mostof the counties which belong to the same system; however, there are no relative studies onthe phenomenon of nominalization in it. Hou Weirui’s studies on the stylistic features andLv Shuxiang’s studies on Jespersen’s theory of Rank, Nexus and Junction have enlightenedthe author to put forward the analogical analysis between Jespersen’s theory ofnominalization and that of Halliday’s, taking Companies Act as a case. Thus, three researchquestions are raised as following: firstly, how does Jespersen’s theory of Rank, Nexus andJunction realizes in ACT? Secondly, what is/are the limitation(s) of Jespersen’s relativetheory? At last, in the case of ACT, how Jespersen’s theory occur effect(s) on Halliday’srelative theory?Theoretically, this tentative study researches the phenomenon of nominalization in legalEnglish discourse from the perspective of Jespersen and Halliday. Jespersen’s first attempton classification of nominalization gives hints to the following linguists, including Hallidayto observe the transformation of words in language. Halliday’s further classification ofnominalization from the perspective of GM makes it possible to analyze the discourse offormality. Jespersen’s contributions to nominalization should not be neglected when itappears in Halliday’s theory of GM. Therefore, this study provides a new perspective for theresearch on nominalization, and brings more think on Jespersen’s importance in China, andthe present analysis of nominalizations in legal English discourse can be a complement to theprevious studies.Practically, with the development of globalization, people from different countries aregetting together to do business, and laws are necessarily in need to regulate the social activities and businesses, but some second language learners often find that it is difficult toconduct effective comprehension of legal English discourse. This thesis can help them graspthe characteristics of legal English discourse and then achieve their comprehensive ability.This thesis is established as a corpus, and then the author will select the data in thiscorpus to analyze nominalization of GM in legal English discourse. The research will adoptboth descriptive and qualitative approaches to analyze the data.20nominalizedgroups/sentences to be analyzed in this thesis are taken from Companies Act (2006). These20groups/sentences will be made a small corpus and the production of nominalization willbe analyzed from the perspective of Jespersen and Halliday. To ensure the liability of the20groups/sentences, the author has tested them with David Mellinkoff’s view on the sevencharacteristics of legal English discourse. To prove the effect of Jespersen’s theory on that ofHalliday’s, the author also collected the data from other discourse of formality to test thehypothesis of the thesis.The result of this thesis can be concluded as the following: firstly, Jespersen’s theoryof rank and nominalization has provided original source for that of Halliday’s; secondly,Jespersen’s theory is limited in the scope semantics and syntax, while Halliday’s theory caninterpret the phenomenon of nominalization from the perspective of language metafunction;at last, nominalizations in ACT justify that nominalization can help to achieve fairness,objectiveness and conciseness. |
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