Nominalization And Its Metafunctions In Academic Paper Introductions Of Computer Science

Introduction is a key component of academic papers. It is the starting point of a paper, and plays many roles as well:It should be objective enough to describe scientific phenomenon as genuine as possible. It also should be concise enough to express large amount of information within limited space. Finally, it should be typical enough for authors to convey the main idea of the paper without any partial judgment. All of these features are functioned by employing various linguistic tools.Nominalization is abundant in written language and has proved to be an effective way to reflect the grammatical metaphor. Furthermore, it realizes metafunctions from three dimensions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Based on the grammatical metaphor theory and the theoretical frameworks of three metafunctions proposed by Halliday, this paper collected100pieces of academic paper released by native English speakers from foreign journals in Computer Science. Qualitative and quantitative research methods have been adopted in analyzing the distribution of nominalization in academic paper introduction.Among five types of nominalization, transference of quality to entity and transference of process to entity are the most prominent. The formation of nominalization involves the shifting from congruency to incongruency. According to Halliday, the congruency refers to the direct and unmarked expression while the incongruency indicates the indirect and marked expression. They share the same lexical meaning, but the later is more descriptive than the former The results show that the nominalization in the corpus reflects the metafunctions in three dimensions: ideationally, nominalization could enhance the degree of lexical density, doubling the semantic meaning and being more descriptive; interpersonally, nominalization is helpful in enhancing the objectivity, and hiding author’s judgments; textually, nominalization makes the text compact, shifting the position of new information and being helpful in cohesion.The research results of this paper show the universality of grammatical metaphor theory in other genres, as well as the importance and its function of nominalization in academic paper introduction. It will throw a light on the subsequent studies about nominalization. Also, it will be helpful in academic paper writing and teaching.