VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES KRKKKK PHAM THUY MAI NOMINALIZATION IN ARTICLES OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS (Danh hóa trong các bài bao của tap chi Educational M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English linguistics Code: 60220201 HANOI - 2015 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES KREKKK PHAM THUY MAI NOMINALIZATION IN ARTICLES OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS (Danh hóa trong các bài báo của tạp chi Educational M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English linguistics Code: 60220201 Supervisor: Nguyén Thi Minh Tam, PhD HANOI - 2015 DECLARATION I hereby state that I (Pham Thuy Mai, from Group K22C), being a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Graduation Paper deposited in the library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the origin of my paper deposited in the library should be accessible for the purpose of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the librarians for the care, loan or reproduction of the paper. Pham Thuy Mai ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my pleasure to thank those who made this thesis possible. Firstly, I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Mrs.
Nguyen Thi Minh Tam, whose encouragement, guidance and support from the initial to the final level enabled me to develop an understanding of the subject. Secondly, I am truly grateful to the teachers in Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, ULIS, VNU for their devotion to provide me with a strong foundation for my knowledge. Last but not least, I am heartily thankful to my family — my parents and my sister, and my close friend Nguyen Mai Le who supported me in any respect during the completion of the study. ii ABSTRACT Nominalization is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon in English, especially in English writing.
As a universal characteristic of human language, nominalization has attracted interests of many linguists. Basing on the theory of functional grammar developed by Halliday, this thesis aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in the articles of Educational Studies. With the corpus of 5 research articles extracted from the journal Educational Studies, the author has made an attempt to show the distribution of nominalization in the articles and carry out an analysis in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Additionally, the paper tries to examine the possible effects of nominalization in academic discourses.
The author hopes that this paper will yield some insights and contribute to the studies of grammatical metaphor. In addition, implications for teaching and translating academic discourses would be offered in this thesis. 1H TABLE OF CONTENTS DeclarafIOn.cQ ee ene neces tent ene teeta ene eneneeneenenaeneeaenaes 1 Acknowledgement 2.cccc cee ce cece ence eee ne nent een cent nee ng etna ene nha 1 ADbStract Hi. 11 Table of contents.
QC SH nh nh nh nh nà 1V List of abbreviations. Q2 SH nh nh nh nhiệt Mi List of tables and figures .-- c2 n SH ng SE nh nhà ru VI PART A: INTRODUCTION. Aims of the Study. Scope of the study.
ch eee eneeeneenenaeneenees 2 4. Significance of the study. SH eee nh nh kg 2 5. Design of the Study 0.
cece cece cence cence ee ene neces eens eneeeeaeneeneneeneens 2 PART B: DEVELOPMENT. nen nhe 4 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND .- SH SH nh nh hy 4 1. Notion of nominalization. Nominalization in the view of Systemic Functional Grammar and as grammatical metaphor.
cece cece eee ceneee eee ee eee HH SH TT nh Km nh ch 17 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY. Data collection procedure. Data analyzing instruments and methods. che 20 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION.
Realization of nominalization in the five articles of Educational Studies. Distribution of nominalization. Distribution of nominalization subtypes. Nominalization in terms of ideational metafunction.
Nominalization in terms of interpersonal metafunction. Nominalization in terms of textual metafunction. Possible effects of nominalization. ccc cece cece ence cnet eee en een ene ene ees 32 3.
Enhancing concIS€ness. SH SH nh nh nọ tin ki hy 36 PART C: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICA TIONS. Implications for teaching and translating English academic writing. Teaching English academic Writing.
Translating English academic discourse. Limitations and suggestions for further studies. SH HS nh nh nh nà như 40 APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS DA: De-adjectival nominalization DV: De-verbal nominalization CV: Conversion THAT: That clause WH: Wh clause TO: To-infinitive clause VING: Ving clause Eg: Example vi LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Page Table 1: Classification of nominalization 21 Table 2: Distribution of nominalization 23 Table 3: Ideational realization of nominalization 25 Figure 1: Types of process in English 13 Figure 2: Analysis in terms of transitivity 14 Figure 3a: Analysis of metaphorical form 14 Figure 3b: Analysis of congruent form 14 Figure 4: Analysis in terms of mood 15 Figure 5: Analysis in terms of theme 15 Figure 6: Analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme 22 Figure 7: Distribution of nominalization subtypes 24 Figure 8: Interpersonal realization of nominalization 27 Figure 9: Textual realization of nominalization 29 Vil PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Nominalization is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon that is commonly seen in academic discourses.
As one type of academic discourse, English research article is characterized by its reliance on nominalized structures. Undeniably, formality and encapsulation are two principal features of academic writing discourse. These ones could be achieved with the use of nominalization. The frequent use of nominalization renders greater degree of texts’ formality and objectiveness.
Both Halliday (1994/2000) and Ure (1997) think that nominalization is closely related to text formality. Ure (1997) also holds the viewpoint that lexical density might be a norm used for measuring degree of text formality. She maintains that the higher the lexical density of a text is, the more formal the text appears. Therefore, nominalization could be seen as an indicator of text formality.
In addition, nominalization plays an important role of encapsulation (Thompson, 2000). Understanding the nature and characteristics as well as the roles of nominalization in English academic discourse would make great contribution to the perception of this discourse genre, which are necessary for academic writers. Thus, it is of great necessity to conduct a study on the phenomenon of nominalization in academic discourses if we want to learn more about this important variety of English and benefit the reading and writing of English academic discourses, especially research articles. In this thesis, the writer attempts to explore how nominalization is realized in English articles with the hope that it will help readers recognize the importance of nominalization for the comprehension and this genre.
Aims of the study In this study, the writer aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in five English research articles of the journal Educational Studies. More specifically, the author will classify nominalizations in the articles, and give a description of their characteristics and functions based on Halliday’s systemic functional approach. In brief, the study would seek to answer the following questions: 1. How is nominalization realized in the articles of Educational Studies? 2.
What are the possible effects of nominalization in academic discourse? 3. Scope of the study The research’s focus is to investigate the realization of nominalization in the light of systemic functional grammar in the corpus of English research articles extracted from two latest volumes of the journal Educational Studies. Significance of the study The author hopes that this paper will yield some insights into nominalization in academic discourse, especially in research articles. Additionally, the study might offer some suggestions for teaching academic writing and translating academic discourses.
An academic writing would be more formal and concise with the high frequency of nominalization occurring in the writing. Finally, with the results of this study, readers can find common types of nominalization appearing in articles as well as their effects, which might be useful for those who write research articles. Design of the study Following is the construction of the study. Chapter I — Theoretical background: provides the background of the study, including definition of key concepts, theories, and review of related studies.
Chapter 2 — Methodology: describes the corpus compilation and data collection procedure. Data analyzing methods and instruments and analytical framework are also clearly presented in this chapter. Chapter 3 — Findings and Discussion: presents, analyzes and discusses the findings that the researcher found out in order to answer the research questions. PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.
Notion of nominalization Linguists might have different definitions of nominalization. In Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (Bussmann, 1996), broadly speaking, nominalization refers to every derivation of nouns from another word class. Narrowly speaking, nominalization refers to productive process of word formation through which words of all word classes can be used as nouns (Bussmann, 1996: 804). In Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002), nominalization is defined as the grammatical process of forming nouns from other parts of speech, usually verb or adjective (Richards and Schmidt, 2002: 395).
Aarts (1982) defines the nominalization as a process of turning a non-nominal element into a noun group. It has two aspects of sense in definition (Aarts, 1982): 1) In a narrow sense, nominalization refers to the nouns derived from verbs or adjectives including gerund, or the finite clause turning into a nominalization. For example: They rejected my complain — their rejection of my complaint. 2) In a broad sense, nominalization refers to all the elements that can act as noun or noun group.
It includes nominal clauses, infinitives, gerunds, etc. for example (nominalization in italics): - Everyone could see that he did not want to commit himself on the controversy. - That the driver could not control his car was obvious. - The stranger offered to show me the way.
Quirk et al (1985) and Aarts (1982) refer to a narrow sense of nominalization. It only involves the change of form and grammatical categories. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics and Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics focus on the derivation of the words, but these two definitions have a wider and unclear range. All these definitions are all concerned about the changes of the lexical elements but the function and structures of nominalization in a clause.
For some linguists, nominalization broadly refers to “grammatical processes by which a verb, a verb phrase, a sentence, or a portion of a sentence including the verb can function as a noun phrase” (Li and Thompson, 1982:575). According to Halliday (1985), nominalization refers to any element of group that can function as nouns or noun groups in a clause, including clauses, nominalized adjectives or verbs, etc. Nominalization “is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor” (Halliday 2004b:656). Through nominalization, processes (linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, in general, as adjectives) are re-construed metaphorically as nouns, enabling an informationally dense discourse.
Nominalization classification There are different ways of classifying nominalization. Some of them are mentioned as follows: Langacker (1991) argues that nominalization types differ according to the level of organization at which the nominalization takes place. Three types of nominalizations can be distinguished as: nominalizations at the level of the word (e. teacher), nominalizations which nominalize a structure that lies in between a verb and a full clause (Sam's washing the windows) and, finally, nominalizations consisting of full clauses (e.
that Sam washed the windows). In Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991), three types of nominalization are proposed: e Action nominalization nominalizes a verb with no accompanying arguments (actants), creating a new lexical item which designates a generic type of action or event. e Factive nominalization nominalizes a verb along with all of its actants except the subject, these are also called “participles” or “gerunds”.