A Study Of Nominalization As Grammatical Metaphor In Abstracts Of Medical Journals

Nominalzation is a very common grammatical phenomenon in English which represents the direction of the development of human cognition.In accordance with Halliday's classification of grammatical metaphor,there are five types related to nominalization.In this sense,nominalizatoin is the most powerful resource to create grammatical metaphor.Meanwhile,with the development of society,abstracts of medical journals have become a highly concentrated and relatively independent genre,and have offered great convenience for medical readers who can search useful information more conveniently and more efficiently in academic literature retrieval system.Previous studies have focused on the changes of clause structure and the features of nominalization in the discourse of law,news and politics.However,there are few studies concerning on exploring the abstract in medical journals from the perspective of nominalization.So far,there exist such problems as their theoretical evidence is not clear and examples are not typical.Hence,from the perspective of grammatical metaphor in systemic functional grammar,this thesis analyzes and explains the distributions,features and functions of nominalization in abstracts among 60 abstracts from two representative journals,Nature and The Lancet,in quantitative and qualitative approaches.The process of research is stated as follows: Firstly,five types of nominalization are identified.Secondly,the distribution of nominalization is counted to demonstrate the feature of nominalization.Finally,the function of nominalization with examples will be presented in detail.The results show that nominalization owns unique features,distributions and functions in abstracts of medical journals.The research findings are as follows:(i)Abstract is abundant with the use of nominalization.The statistical analysis shows that nominalization frequently occurs in every piece of abstract,so the nominalization belongs to a prominent feature in abstracts of medical journals.(ii)With respect to the distribution of nominalization derived form different elements in clause,it is obvious that the five types of nominalization are referred in construing the abstract in most cases.The nominalizations of Process and Quality take up the highest percentage,which are 78.63% and 17.22% respectively.The former can condense the length ofabstract,the effect of which may convey sufficient information and realize the characteristic of conciseness,and the latter one can objectify the expression and increase the formality of the abstract.The nominalization of Circumstance,Relator and Zero rarely appear because of their complex transferences.(iii)Several functions are taken by nominalization in terms of three metafunctions of language.Ideationally,nominalization enhances the degree of lexical density and expands the information.Interpersonally,the concealment of Mood and Modality in the course of nominalization makes the expression more objective and concise.Textually,nominalization acts as a tool of cohesion,thematic connection,information focus shifting and foregrounding,making the abstract more cohesive and logical.In conclusion,this study can enrich the application range of nominalization,deepen the research in abstract of medical journals,and provide some instructive meaning in abstract writing.