| News reporting is one of the common media in people’s daily life. With the rapid advances in technology and globalization, science news plays a more and more important role in new media and in readers’daily life. The language in English science news has its own features based on the technology language and news language. Studies on science news are mostly from the perspective of stylistics, critical discourse analysis and translation. Few studies focus on nominalization in it.In1985, Halliday, the founder of systemic-functional grammar, initially proposes "Grammatical Metaphor" in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar, ushering in a new perspective for studying metaphor. In accordance with the Halliday’s classification of grammatical metaphor, there are five types related to nominalization. Nominalization is the most powerful tool to create grammatical metaphor. It is also an important device to generate semantics meaning.From the perspective of grammatical metaphor in systemic-functional grammar, this paper aims to explain and analyze nominalization phenomenon and its metafunctions in English science news. This paper adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the distribution, features and functions of nominalization in20pieces of English science news randomly collected from two representative newspapers:The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. This paper explores the transference mechanism of nominalization from three aspects:semantics, grammatical function and grammatical class. The results show that nominalization is of great significance in English science news. In terms of ideational metafunction, it improves formality and conciseness by high lexical density and package. In regard to interpersonal metafunction, it increases the degree of objectiveness and authority in news reporting. It is also a crucial device to realize cohesion, foregrounding and Theme-Rheme connection in texts concerning the textual metafunction.This study makes a systematic analysis of nominalization and provides a better understanding of both nominalization and English science news. Moreover, it gives some implications and suggestions for further studies on nominalization. |
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