Analysis On English Nominalization Of International Trade Sales Contracts:Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

With the rapid development of technology and economy,International trade sales contracts play a significant role in human's life.The language in International trade sales contracts has its own characteristics based on the law language and contract language.Previous studies on International trade sales contracts are mainly from the angle of stylistics,discourse analysis,genre analysis and translation.Few studies pay attention to nominalization this part.The proposal of the concept of "Grammatical Metaphor"stands for a new period in studying metaphor.At the same time,Halliday classifies grammatical metaphor into thirteen categories.There are five categories relating to nominahzation.Nominalization is regarded as the most powerful device to create grammatical metaphor and express semantic meaning.Based on previous studies on nominalization,this thesis conducts a study on nominalization from the perspective of grammatical metaphor in systemic functional linguistics and adopts International trade sales contracts as a special type of discourse.This research adopts corpus approach and quantitative and qualitative methods,including 53 pieces ot typical International trade sales contracts collected from book:International Business Negotiations and other representative essays and newspapers,such as,the Economist and York Times,which are representative and authoritative standing for native and authentic usage in International trade sales contracts.With respect to the two classifications of nominalization.this thesis mainly studies the distribution feature,transference mechanism and metafunctions of nominalization.One is based on the function of nominalization in clauses,it can be classified into lexical nominalization and clausal nominalization.The other is based on classification of ideational grammatical metaphor,five categories involving in it.About ideational metafunction,it improves formality and conciseness by high lexical density.In terms of interpersonal metafunction,it improves the degree of objectiveness and authoritativeness in sales contracts.With regard to textual metafunction,nominalization can be regarded as an important device to realize cohesion,foregrounding and thematic connection.The more formal discourse,the higher the authority of discourse and the degree of nominalization,but if overusing nominalization,it may be caused distorting even ignoring some important information.Therefore,it should be considered different requirements for application of nominalization in International trade sales contracts,which will be helpful for reader or businessman to understand economic discourse and offer practical significance to a degree.