本文是语言学论文，This chapter summarizes the major findings and lists implications of this study fortheory, practice and pedagogy. Some limitations it possesses are shown clearly andsuggestions for further studies are indicated at last.GM theory ushers from a new perspective for studying metaphor, andnominalization is the powerful resource for creating GM. This thesis, based on theclassification proposed by Halliday,mainly studies the distribution,features andfunctions of nominalization in 60 pieces of abstracts collected from two representativejournals: Nature and The Lancet, employing both qualitative and quantitative methodsinto the analysis. From the above investigated data, the major findings are pointed outbelow.Firstly, AMJ is abundant with the use of nominalization. The statistical analysisshows that nominalization frequently occurs in every piece of AMJ,so the nominalization belongs to a prominent feature of AMJ.Secondly, with respect to the distribution of nominalization derived form differentelements in clause, it is obvious that nearly all five types of nominalization are referredin construing the abstract.As for the average nominalization number per abstract, lexical nominalizationtakes up 88.9% and 11.1% of total nominalization. And this result is lower than theresearch done by Biber et al. (1999/2000) accounting for 75%, Wang (2003, pp. 74-88)taking up 72.6% and Yang (2011, pp. 18-21) accounting for 53.26%. What makes the statistical results different may be the difference lying in corpus selection and researchscale.
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Chapter OneINTRODUCTION
With the progress of medicine science all around the world, Chinese scholarsconstantly submit medical journals with foreign experts to catch up with the globaltrend. Medical journals are essential forms to demonstrate their major findings.Meanwhile, with the rapid speed of modern life, people obtain a variety of instrumentsto get the latest information in specific field and communicate with the outside world,and readers may only pick up the abstract separately from the whole article.As a research-process genre, abstract is different from the research article genre(Swales, 1990, 1994). An abstract that proceeds a text is an advance directives of themain body of the text (Swales, 1990). The abstract functions as an independentdiscourse as well as being an advance indicator of the content and structure of thefollowing paper (Van Dijk, 1980). To sum up, an abstract, as one of in dispensable sections in journal articles, is a summary of a manuscript that allows readers to identifythe concept of a paper quickly and accurately to determine its relevance to theirinterests. Therefore, if a paper is to be accepted, a well-written abstract is of greatsignificance.However, the abstract writing ability in China is seemed not so satisfactory (Wang,2002, pp. 332-337). Fortunately, there are increasingly more learners who are aware ofthe importance of abstract and start studying abstract writing in various ways. It isadmitted that nominalization is widely used in medical papers and English is a sort ofnominalized language (Fowler, 1991, p. 79). Although the percentage of nominalizationvaries in various registers, nearly all written discourses are characterized bynominalization. Medical journal, serving as a type of relatively formal discourse, isnoted for its frequent use of nominalization. Two studies of Yang (Yang, 2006, 2011)show in scientific discourse nominalization ranks the second fraquency place. Hence,for helping students as well as contributors who submit to editors improve their abstractwriting ability, it is necessary to obtain the method of applying nominalization to dailywriting. Luckily, more and more investigators who are interested in nominalization setabout finding different perspectives to study nominalization.English abstract, as a formal discourse, has aroused many scholars’ attentions.However, the syntactic features of nominalization in abstracts of medical journals haveoften been neglected. Therefore, this thesis is intended to explore how nominalization isemployed in medical journals and how its syntactic features are embodied.
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Chapter TwoLITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Previous Studies on Nominalization
Jespersen (1924, p. 137) discusses the two clauses as Table 2.1 presented. Owingto nominalization, there comes to some shifts in rank. In (1a) Doctor is the subjectbelonging to the primary member, but in (1b) the subject, Doctor changes into thepossessive case shifting down to the secondary member in the noun phrase, Doctor’sreally astonishing cleverness. Meanwhile, clever, really, astonishingly are all shifted upthe same level. This example shows that (1b) is more compact than (1a).While in the later period, Quirk et al. (1985) further discusses nominalization. Hetakes nominalization as a noun and noun phrase corresponding to a clause structure andclaims that nominalization should be separated from word category shift. However,Quirk et al. just defines nominalization vaguely without specifying how to distinguishnominalization and word category shift. The weakness of traditional approaches tonominalization relies on that they just focus on the syntax level without taking semanticand text into consideration.Conducted by Immediate Constituent analysis, Bloomfield (1933) regardsnominalization as an endocentric construction, in accordance that nominalization isdetermined by its head and it is a kind of word form change by virtue of adding thenominal derived affixes. For instance:The two clauses possess the same meaning and the subtle difference, connectingwith the headword and its functions. Both two words fear and fears serve as headwordin (2a) and (2b). However, fear acts as predicate belonging to Material Process whilefears acts as part of the subject belonging to Sensor in Mental Process, which aredevoted to different word classes and are employed to fill different slots in clause.Another representative of structural grammar, Fries proposes the binary constituentanalysis while analyzing the construction of nominalization. The construction of thenominalization an oral examination of the students which is thorough can be analyzedas Fries (1952, p. 266) does. See Figure 2.1.Wang and Chen (2008) exerts the use of nominalization in argumentative writingby Chinese EFL students with a comparison of nominalization to native English corpus.This study finds that the use of nominalization by Chinese EFL learners is generallyless than English native speakers, but the difference is not statistically significant. Thefindings of this study may contribute to English lexicology and writing teaching inChina. Tan (2011) reports a corpus-based contrastive study on metaphoric applicationon nominalization in scientific discourse between Chinese EFL learners and Englishnative speakers. This empirical study shows that Chinese learners seldom exertnominalization to realize Theme-Rheme cohesion, shedding some implications onimproving Chinese EFL learners’ scientific writing ability.
2.2 Previous Studies on Abstract
As the proportion of publication contributed to research information continues toincrease worldwide, abstracts keep on growing in significance but they all proveinadequate. This section will review the abstract in terms of its definition, significance,and classification, following by studies from several aspects.Abstract, as the front matter in published papers, plays an essential role inacademic writing, serving as advance indicators of the whole text (Swales, 1990, 1994).It has been acknowledged that few journals publish passages without submittingabstract, so that abstract takes the role of first impression to readers or editors.With regard to readers, today is an information-exploded time as people have tohandle a mass of information in short time. As for editors of academic journals, thedelivered abstract composes the evidence to estimate whether an article can be receivedfor publication. Towards students in China who are required to accomplish a thesis anddissertation in order to fulfill the degree diploma, both Chinese and English abstractsare indispensably requisite, so that students are in great need of attaching importance toabstract. Now many universities keep a watchful eye on abstract writing and offercourses to teach them how to write a well-written abstract in relation to exams tested forthe practical abstract-writing ability.As the scholars researched so far, the importance of abstract among the languagelearners is stated and it should be in line with the functions and usage of abstracts.With respect to Gibson (1993, pp. 55-56) arises four basic types of abstracts calledinformative, indicative, critical and author-prepared abstracts. Furthermore Yu (2003)summaries as follows: (1) The indicative, or descriptive type, accommodates generalsubject matter of the article, often indicating the context in a qualitative way andproving some evidence of the article relevant to the reader’s purpose so as to help thereader decides whether to keep reading the full passage or not. (2) The informative, orinformational abstract, highlights the major findings and results, quantitatively butbriefly, without unfolding interpretation or illustration, so that readers have not to referto the original text. (3) The critical abstract, is rarely found in most common journals,for there is neither information such as research method or findings nor compactedmessage of the article. However, it adds some subjective point of view and evaluationof the original article. (4) The author-prepared abstract, is rare for most academicspreface abstract before the full text or deliver to conference’ organizers.Due to the big proportion of indicative and informal abstracts in academiccommunity, this thesis adopts the first two types of abstract proceeding to analyze thedata collected.#p#分页标题#e#
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Chapter Three THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK.............................................. 19
3.1 Major Theories Relevant to Grammatical Metaphor......................................... 19
3.2 Classification of Grammatical Metaphor...........................................................23
3.3 Reclassification of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor and Nominalization......27
3.4 Classification of Nominalization....................................................................... 29
Chapter Four ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION.................................................34
4.1 Research Procedure............................................................................................34
4.2 The Distribution of Lexical and Clausal Nominalization.................................. 34
4.3 Shift of Semantic Function of Nominalization in AMJ..................................... 36
4.4 Function of Nominalization............................................................................... 47
Chapter Five CONCLUSION.............................................................................. 63
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Chapter FourANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
4.1 Research Procedure
According to the classification and definition of nominalization, the thesis is tocheck which type will be the most frequently utilized in abstract writing and itscontribution for constructing abstract.In the first step, each type of nominalization in abstract is labeled, and the numberof clauses is marked at the beginning of each clause.In the second step, statistics will be gathered and contributions of thenominalization will be analyzed to figure out the most frequently facilitated.In the third step, the thesis simultaneously examines accessible and compatiblefunctions with the objective requirement of abstracting writing.Halliday (2008) states five types of nominalization related to GM, and there arethree aspects of semantic transference concerning their shifting mechanism. They aresemantic function, grammatical function and grammatical class. A summary has beenmade in the previous chapter of theoretical framework. For instance, semantic functionmakes the Process into Entity, grammatical function makes the event to thing andgrammatical class makes verbs to noun. This section will reveal the five types oftransference in AMJ from the perspective of semantic level.Sixty abstracts of medical journals are selected in this study as samples. TheConcordance tool of Ant Conc is able to quickly filtrate the nominal forms from thosesixty abstracts. Of course, manually checking is undoubtedly necessary in order toexclude the instances which do not belong to nominalization phenomenon. For example,the noun form of a word is the same as its verb form like this study examines; however,the noun study is actually not transferred from the verb form. Such kind of words arenot nominalization of Process, but searching tool still regards them as nominalization phenomenon. Therefore, in order to ensure the accuracy of the statistical results, it isnecessary to manually check the results of the secondary inspection. Five types oftransference in nominalization are listed as Table 4.3, presenting the number ofdistribution at semantic level.
4.2 The Distribution of Lexical and Clausal Nominalization
Based on the classification of nominalization, there are two levels to investigatenominalization: namely lexical and clausal level. The author sums up the number ofnominalization and total words in sample abstracts from lexical and clausal level, andcontinues to calculate the percentage of the average number per abstract and thepercentage of total nominalization. Table 4.1 shows that the frequency of lexicalnominalization and clausal nominalization.It is obvious to find that the frequency of lexical nominalization ranks a higherpercentage than that of clausal nominalization, 314 and 39 instances respectively. Withrespect to the average nominalization number per abstract, lexical nominalization takesup 5.23 and clausal nominalization takes up 0.65, accounting for 88.9% and 11.1% oftotal nominalization. From the view of scientific discourse, Biber et al. (1999/2000)calculates the percentage of nominalization (Number of clauses/Number ofnominalization) which accounts for 75%, and Wang (2003, pp. 74-88) analyzes thepercentage of nominalization that takes up 72.6%. Yang (2011, pp. 18-21) gives a lowerresult about this statistical analysis which accounts for 53.26%, and that result is almostsimilar to this thesis in AMJ, taking up 57.2% shown as Table 4.2.What makes the statistical results different may be the difference lying in corpusselection and research scale. The data is collected from medical journals which enjoygreat reputation all over the world, so the wording may be not so hard as the passagesare available for readers from different levels. In addition, this thesis just chooses sixtyabstracts to analyze the nominalization phenomenon and may result in a subtledifference with the research by Biber et al. (1999/2000), Wang (2003) and Yang (2011).Chapter
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FiveCONCLUSION
5.1 Main Findings
Thirdly, several functions are taken by nominalization in terms of threemetafunctios of language. From the view ofmetafunction, nominalization increases the lexical density and packages information, greatly improving concisenessand formality in AMJ. From the angle of interpersonal metafunction, nominalizationrealizes the objective function by concealing the doer and goal of the event and makesthe abstract non-negotiable as an existential fact. With regard to the textualmetafunction, nominalization acts as a tool of cohesion, thematic connection,information focus shifting and foregrounding to make the abstract more cohesive andlogical. To sum up, all the research questions put forward in Chapter four have beenanswered one by one. The study shows that nominalization embodies distinct featuresand useful functions, and plays an important role in AMJ.
5.2 Implications
Nominalization is a very common phenomenon in English, especially in abstract ofmedical journals, which endows the text more objective and formal. AMJ being aformal variety in which nominalization occurs in high frequency is a kind of variety thatreaders and hearers are generally exposed to, so it is of importance to get a deepexploration in terms of this linguistic phenomenon.This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis ofnominalization in AMJ. Thus, this thesis offers a better understanding of bothnominalization and AMJ. There are several implications of this study. Within theapplication of SFG, the study, on the basis of the findings, also presents sometheoretical, practical and pedagogical implications in AMJ writing.Theoretically speaking, grammatical metaphor is a characteristic of formal andwritten discourses, especially in scientific text, and nominalization which evolves firstin scientific and technical register. The author enriches the application scope of GMtheory proposed by Halliday, that is to say, this research combines nominalization andAMJ organically, so it is possible to analyze nominalization in other discourses.Practically speaking, based on the study on the distribution, features and functionsof nominalization in AMJ in this thesis, authors of abstract of medical journals may usenominalization on purpose to realize different written goals. For example, if writersintend to emphasize an event, they can use the foregrounding function ofnominalization: transfer the process, quality and other elements into event, and then putthem as the Theme in the clause. If writers would like to make the expression moreobjective, they can use nominalization to depersonalize the clause by removing thelogic subject and finite elements. In addition, nominalization is one of the mosteffective tools to make the abstracts concise, authoritative and cohesive. In terms ofreaders and hearers, comprehending the transference mechanism and functions ofnominalization assists them to have a better understanding of abstract writing so as toread and understand expert’s language in a professional field.Pedagogically speaking, nominalization is not the only feature in AMJ. It is acommon phenomenon in all written language. Hence, gaining some knowledge aboutnominalization is good for students in English writing. It is known to all that there is aobvious difference between Chinese and English: verbs are used more frequently inChinese than that of in English, and nouns are more frequently used in English than thatof in Chinese. Therefore, by means of changing the logic thinking of English leaners,taking nominalization into abstract writing teaching has many benefits for students toimprove their abstract writing ability.
参考文献（略）
参考文献（略）
