| China Daily,as the only official English newspaper in China,has become the platform for foreign media to obtain business news from China.The Economist,as a famous economic newspaper in the UK,has great international influence.China Daily Corpus and The Economist Corpus include business news under Business columns in China Daily and The Economist respectively and the research combines both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the general distributions of nominalization and the differences between the distributions of nominalization of notional words in the two newspapers.It also applies ideational and textual functions from Systemic Functional Grammar to analyze the functions of nominalization in English business news and further probes into the reasons for the different distributions of nominalization in the two corpora.The author finds that the frequency of nominalization of notional words in China Daily is significantly lower than that in The Economist.Among the 20 endings of nominalized notional words,the distributions of 9 out of them,which are verbs directly used as nouns and words ending with-er/-or/-ee/-ess,-ment,-ness,-ty,-th,-ry,-ist and-ism are significantly different.The distributions of words from verbs and adjectives are also significantly dissimilar.Moreover,there are differences in the top three nominalized notional words in China Daily and The Economist.The research also discovers that the ideational and textual functions of Systemic Functional Grammar are useful in analyzing the positive functions of nominalization of notional words in making clauses concise,saving space and enhancing coherence.Also,the author puts forward three reasons for the different distributions of nominalization of notional words in China Daily and The Economist,namely different economic backgrounds,different culture and English education in China.This study can provide some reference for Chinese EFL learners to comprehend English business news. |
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