A Study Of Nominalization And Its Functions In English Advertising Texts

As one of the most common features of human language, nominalization and its related topics have received extensive attention of researchers in linguistics and translation fields. The four mainstream linguistic schools abroad, including structural linguistics, transformational-generative linguistics, systemic-functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, have conducted systematic elaboration. By contrast, however, based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar theory, the research on the phenomenon of nominalization is more comprehensive and systematic. Different from other linguists, Halliday’s study of nominalization is not limited to the metaphor in traditional sense. Halliday puts forward re-recognition and reevaluation of nominalization under the framework of Grammatical Metaphor (GM), and considers that nominalization is a powerful means to form grammatical metaphor. In systemic functional linguistics theory, the metafunctions of GM include: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Although nominalization is independent from these three functions in the mode of GM, it has close relationship with these functions.Nominalization endows action process or property of things with the characteristics of an entity. The utilization of nominalization is considered as one of the significant features of written English and formal English. Nominalization can increase. the objectivity, authoritativeness, and accuracy of the texts. The previous researches mainly focus on science and technology texts, legal documents, news discourse and other formal discourses or texts. While, we find that nominalization in English advertising texts is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. However, not enough attention has been paid to the phenomenon and functions of nominalization in English advertising. In view of the above situation, with the framework of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and from the perspective of grammatical metaphor, this study makes a tentative analysis of the phenomenon of nominalization and how nominalization realizes the three metafunctions in English advertising. The data of this study is mainly collected from printed magazines and newspapers abroad during2012-2013, such as Newsweek, Economist, Women’s Weekly, and New York Times. The author randomly selects100ads as the corpus of analysis, and makes a statistics of the five classifications:car ads, watch ads, food and medicine ads, cosmetic ads and other ads. And then the nominalization in the ads is further divided into six types according to Tang Bin’s standard of classification: feeling, property, action, effect, aim and others. According to the calculation and analysis of the collected data, we can make a conclusion that the total percentage of using nominalization in these100ads is67%. And there are totally188nominalizations in these67ads. Therefore, it turns out that nominalization is frequently used in these five types of English advertisements. And it is found out that nominalization is most frequently employed in car ads and watch ads. As for the percentage of the five types of nominalization, it is found out that Type Feeling is the most used type of nominalization in the67ads, which occupies28.72%of the total nominalization; Type Property is the second most used type, which occupies23.40%; Type Action is the third one, occupying21.81%. While, the other three types are less employed. Further more, it shows that it is true nominalization can be further modified although the number is not very large which only occupies27.7%of the total nominalization.Through analysis and discussion, this study draws the conclusions as follows:first, in terms of ideational function, nominalization metaphorizes action process, property of the products and feelings caused by the products into entity, thus improving the objectivity and conciseness of the advertisement. In this way, the pleasant feelings that the advertised products bring to the customers become concrete and highlighted. In terms of interpersonal function, with the non-negotiability of nominalization, the credibility of the products is enhanced; furthermore, nominalization conceals the subjectivity of evaluation to achieve the persuasion function of advertising, and it also can carry out commendatory evaluation and revaluation to strengthen the favorable feeling and impression of the products to the customers. In terms of textual function, nominalization employs. cohesive devices, such as repetition and ellipsis, to make advertising texts more cohesive and coherent.