A Study Of Nominalization In English Proverbs From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

Nominalization which prevails in human language has always caughtattentions of linguists and scholars in many countries. It is a grammatical processwhich transfers a non-nominal element or a set of such elements to a nominal one aswell as a linguistic phenomenon. That the human’s cognition of nominalization hasexperienced a gradual process could be demonstrated by retrospect of major foreignlinguistic schools which address this topic as the research issue. Among theseexplorations of different schools, only Systemic-Functional School provides asystematic account of theoretical framework to situate the exhaustive andcomprehensive analysis of nominalization.This thesis is an attempt to probe overall phenomenon of nominalization inEnglish proverbs, applying relative theories in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Itfirst reviews the history of researches about nominalization, and introduces theorieson grammatical metaphor and nominalization in Functional Grammar. Then it studiessemantic features, formal characteristics and possible defects of nominalization inEnglish proverbs. Afterwards, the thesis discusses nominalization in proverbs isconducive greatly to realization of ideational, interpersonal and textual metaphors. Atlast, it investigates the contributions of nominalization in English proverbs.This thesis takes100English proverbs which contain at least one nominalizingelement as the corpus of exploration and focuses on their functions in ideational, interpersonal and textual metaphors from the perspective of grammatical metaphorwithin the framework of Functional Grammar. By studying these proverbs in therespect of ideational metaphor, nominalization packing large information makesEnglish proverbs more concise and objective; in the respect of interpersonal metaphor,it promotes communication, heightening authority and credibility of English proverbs;in the respect of textual metaphor, the realization of symmetry through nominalizationin English proverbs reinforces morphological and reading effect.