Function Of Nominalization In Obama’s Political Speeches

Nominalization is a phenomenon in which any part of a sentence can betransformed into nominal units. As a universal phenomenon in English, nominalizationarouses the attention of linguists from different linguistic schools. Among which,Holliday, the Systemic functional linguist, puts forward the striking theory ofgrammatical metaphor. He states that nominalization is the most powerful way torealize grammatical metaphor, with the features of objectiveness, abstract and accuracy,thus nominalization is applied into many aspects such as scientific discourse, legaldocument, news report and academic discourse. This thesis aims to explore thefunctions of nominalization in Obama’s political speeches from the perspective ofgrammatical metaphor.Since Obama’s political speeches belong to a special kind of political discourse asit owns the features of both verbal and written formal discourse, its nominalization hasparticularity. Thirty samples are downloaded from http://www.whitehouse.gov/. First,the thesis counts the frequency of the five types of nominalization. Then, functions ofnominalization are explored in terms of three metafunctions of language: ideational,interpersonal and textual functions.According to statistic analysis, the results reveal that a certain amount ofnominalization exists in Obama’s political speeches. As both the verbal characteristicsand written features, the frequency of nominalization is slightly lower than the writtentexts and higher than ordinary conversation. In the process of nominalization,nominalization of verbs and nominalization of adjectives occur frequently in sequence,and the nominalization of prepositions, conjunctions and “zero” occurs rarely. Based onthe three metafunctions of language, ideationally, nominalization can realize thefunctions of semantic expansion, conciseness and formality. Interpersonally,nominalization can make the discourse more objective. Textually, nominalization canfacilitate the Theme-Rheme progression and make the discourse more cohesive. It is expected that the research will provide some insights into a morecomprehensive and deep understanding of the linguistic characters and the politicalviewpoints hidden in this kind of discourse. And the same time, it is also hoped that thestudy provides a new perspective for political speech.