系统功能语法视角下英语新闻名词化问题的研究

1. Introduction

1.1 Research Background
It is known to all that news is very important in our life with the economicglobalization and the development of technology and science. Nowadays, people have avariety of instruments to acquire information and communicate with the outside world. Ofall these instruments, people may regard newspapers and Internet as two priorities to gainthe latest information, to influence our thinking, or just to entertain ourselves. Newspaperwhich is one of the major forms of mass media plays a primary part in our life.News discourses being proper to news reporting in network, television andnewspaper is one of the practical styles in modern English and one of the standards ofEnglish language. Van Dijk said that people’s attitudes, ideologies and knowledge mainlycome from news discourses, whether they are common people or elites (1988). Newsdiscourse has a great influence on our life and language. In nearly all universities andcolleges, an essential course for English major is reading and writing for news discourse.Nominalization is one of the most important features of formal written discourses.As Fowler says, “English is a sort of nominalized language” (1991, p.79). Almost allEnglish written discourses are characterized by nominalization. The percentage ofnominalization varies in different varieties. News discourse, which is one type ofrelatively formal written discourses, is noted for its high frequency of nominalization.According to Yang Xinzhang’s research, of all clauses, nominalization in news discoursetakes up 48%, second to technological discourse and third to legal discourse (2005). If wewant to know more about news discourse and take advantage of it, it is necessary toexplore this distinctive feature of news discourses.
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1.2 Significance of the Research
Nominalization is a common phenomenon in English, especially in writtendiscourse, which can make discourses more formal and objective. News discourses is kindof formal variety in which nominalization has high percentage. It is also a type of varietythat people are widely exposed to. In western countries, nominalization has been studiedfor a long time, and there are new discoveries gradually. In recent years, the study fornominalization has been a hot topic at home. Although Chinese learners has done greatcontributions to this field and has had some related achievements, there are few importantworks compared with the field of western linguistics because the study for nominalizationis too late from the perspective of linguistics. This thesisgives a general introduction tothe historical development of nominalization. Since there are so many linguistic schools inwestern countries, only several distinctive research angles and prominent researchachievements are introduced, thus readers may have a general understanding towardsnominalization. So far, there is not an agreement for the definition of nominalization, sothe author chooses several relatively influencing ones to introduce. According to theknown literary, there are many researches related to nominalization and news discourse,but there are few articles or books related to the combination of both nominalization andnews discourse. The thesis attempts to combine the two aspects and try to find a newresearch field. To be more exact, the thesis will study nominalization in news discoursesfrom the perspective of systemic-functional grammar. Based on the study, thesignificances of the research can be shown clearly.

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2. Literary Review and Theoretical Framework

2.1 The Study of Nominalization Abroad and at Home
The study of nominalization can be traced back to Ancient Greece. Although theyhave not proposed the concept of nominalization, Plato and Aristotle divide words intotwo parts of speech: nominal constituents and verbal constituents. They have discussedtransformation between noun and verb (Liu，2000). Structural linguistics analyzes thestructure of nominalization and some problems from the angle of the vocabulary form andJespersen studies nominalization much earlier and he analyzes a series of questionsaroused by nominalization in his book Analytic Syntax. Then researches on nominalizationhave been conducted from multi-perspective. Transformational-generative linguistics has aclear classification of nominalization based on the form of nominalization.Systemic-functional grammar’s study for nominalization is more thorough and moresystemic, and Halliday as a representative explains nominalization from the perspective ofgrammatical metaphor. Cognitive linguistics regards the process of nominalization as theideational process and Langacker classifies nominalization in his book Foundation ofCognitive Grammar, which can be regarded as the basic study of nominalization from theaspect of cognitive linguistics (1987). Based on the above introduction, it is obvious thatsystemic-functional grammar has its own unique effect when they explain the phenomenonof nominalization. Systemic-functional grammar proposes an unique explanation from itsexperience and the angle of grammatical metaphor, and the study for the phenomenon ofnominalization has been placed to an unpredictable degree. A brief literature review cannot only give some basic information of nominalization study already made, but alsoprovide some useful implication and enlightenment for the present study.
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2.2 Theoretical Framework
Since different schools study nominalization from different angles, they havedifferent definitions about nominalization. However, all these definitions can be classifiedinto two kinds: definitions from the perspective of form and from the perspective ofmeaning.According to Oxford Concise Dictionary of Lingusitics, “nominalization is anyprocess by which either a noun or a syntactic unit functioning as a nounphrase is derivedfrom any other kind of unit such as a verb or an adjective.” (Matthews, 1997, p.233). Forexample: Systemic-functional linguists study nominalization in terms of meaning-orientedaspect. Halliday (1973) holds that nominalization is a form of grammatical metaphor,which is an important means for people to know the world. Grammatical metaphor (i.e.expressing a meaning by a lexicogrammatical form originally used to express a differentmeaning, using a nominal form to express a property meaning (congruently worded as anadjective)or a process meaning (congruently worded as a verb) is a process by which event,activity, emotion or thought can be transformed into entity. For example:

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3. Research Design ........23 
3.1 Research Questions ...... 23 
3.2 Data Collection ...... 23
 4. Data Analysis and Discussion ........25 
4.1 Main Functions of Nominalization....... 25
4.2 Contrastive Analysis of Nominalization between Technological .... 32 
4.3 Discussion of the Possible Reasons for the Use of Nominalization ..... 36
5. Conclusion .....43 
5.1 Major findings ....... 43 
5.2 Implications ..... 44 
5.3 Limitations....... 44

4. Data Analysis and Discussion

4.1 Main Functions of Nominalization
Based on the analysis of the corpus selected in this thesis, the use of nominalizationmay exclude personal pronouns, enlarge the conciseness of the discourse and make thediscourse more objective etc. After the overall study of nominalization in bothtechnological and political news discourses, the main functions of nominalization are toachieve economy, impersonalization, objectivity, cohesion, conciseness and formality.Each function of nominalization listed above is analyzed in detail in the following part. One of the fundamental differences between written English and spoken English iseconomy. The general pressure for journalists is to compress the information into arelatively limited space since the information a piece of news discourse provided is almostalways decided by the space and layout of the pages. According to Qin Xinbai (2000)journalists should provide as much information as possible in a very simple sentence innews discourse, so after expanding the basic simple sentence, nouns and verbs which havemany modifiers will be found. That is nominalization can be used to condense muchinformation in a limited space.

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Conclusion

This thesis is about nominalization in both technological and political newsdiscourses. It is obvious that nominalization is multi-functional. Data shows thatnominalization can be used to achieve the functions of economy, impersonalization,objectivity, cohesion, conciseness and formality. The occurrence of nominalization isdifferent in technological and political news discourses. Nominalization is much higher intechnological news report (42% of all causes) than that in political news discourse, whichtakes up 21.6%. Among the various functions of nominalization listed above, functionslike economy and cohesion can be found in both technological and political newsdiscourses. The function of objectivity and conciseness take a higher percentage intechnological news discourse than that in political news discourse. The function ofimpersonalization is more important for political news than for technological newsdiscourse. The reasons for the use of nominalization are intralinguistic (cohesion,reference and format) and extralinguistic factors (informing, description and narration).

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Reference (omitted)