This paper examines the metaphorical modes of expression by means of ATION suffix. Based on an English corpus built of official texts, it looks at the identification of nominals with –ATION, their metaphorical meanings, and their distribution across two sub-corpora – ADB texts and WB texts.
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-ATION NOMINALS AND THEIR METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION IN
ENGLISH OFFICIAL TEXTS
Le Thi Giao Chi
University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Danang; giaochi0502@gmail.com
Abstract - In the domain of functional grammar, the term
nominalisation refers to non-congruent metaphorical modes of
expression, and is a predominant tendency characteristic of
grammatical metaphor Nominalisation is often considered as an
alternative way of encoding verbal meanings, and is a prominent
feature of written discourse By means of nominalisation, a text
tends to be more lexically-dense since nominalisations can perform
important functions: deleting agency, turning processes into
entities, or condensing long strings of shorter sentences into fewer
longer sentences, thus making a text more succinct, more abstract,
and more sophisticated.In this way, nominalisation can embed
within its constructions several grammatical metaphorical
meanings This paper examines the metaphorical modes of
expression by means of –ATION suffix Based on an English
corpus built of official texts, it looks at the identification of nominals
with –ATION, their metaphorical meanings, and their distribution
across two sub-corpora – ADB texts and WB texts Some
generalisations on the metaphorical representation of -ATION
nominals are then drawn, and quantitative data are provided to
support the claims made on these metaphorical representations
Key words - metaphorical representation; nominalisation as
grammatical metaphor; -ATION nominals; corpus; official texts
1 Introduction
Grammatical Metaphor (GM), a term coined by
Halliday [2], is a feature of language whereby shift or
movement of elements within the domain of
lexico-syntactical grammar permits the change of
linguistic functions, or the reconfigurations of ideational
expressions The traditional concepts of metaphor are often
restricted to the transfer from something literal (e.g the
heart of a person) to something new in a figurative sense
(e.g the heart of a city) whereas that of GM allows more
than just this type of rhetorical representation Here,
processes which are normally expressed by verbs tend to
experience a lexico-semantic shift into things
re-represented by de-verbal nouns (e.g from John wrote a
letter to John’s writing a letter, or they drove rapidly down
the hill to their rapid down-hill driving)
These non-congruent metaphorical modes of
expression are categorised in the domain of functional
grammar by Halliday [2/3] and by Halliday and
Matthiessen [4] as nominalisation, which is a predominant
tendency characteristic of grammatical metaphor
Nominalisation is often considered as an alternative way of
encoding verbal meanings, and is a prominent feature of
written discourse characterised by text density which is
often achieved via nominalisation In fact, nominalisations
perform important ideological functions such as deleting
agency, turning processes into entities, or condensing long
strings of shorter sentences into fewer longer sentences [1];
they can make a text more succinct, more abstract, and
more sophisticated [9]
Since languages differ in the way they express common
ideational meanings, representations via nominalisation as
grammatical metaphor can produce different ways of encoding For a full understanding of this linguistic phenomenon, it is important to explore this natural process
of linguistic variations through which various metaphorical representations can be identified for better understanding the message incorporated in nominalised segments Being one of the most frequent nominalisers
the -ATION suffix is added to verbs to derive nouns, as
observed by Katamba [7, 59], or Harley [5, 123] The term -ATION nominals are used to refer to the whole nominalised segment formed by both the de-verbal noun
and other linguistic constituents For example, the early
phase of project implementation is labeled as a nominal
with -ATION, comprising of a de-verbal noun
implementation, an adjective early, nouns phase and process, and certain grammatical categories
(i.e determiner the and preposition of)
2 Corpus Building and Data Analysis
2.1 Corpus Building
For this study, a corpus is built of English texts being official documents released by the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) The collected corpus
represents a specific genre of language – that is the official
discourse which is, like academic texts, assumed to be
lexically dense and highly nominalised [8] The text size varies from around 4 282 words to 17 343 words, with three ADB texts (mainly reports and guidelines), and five WB texts (i.e discussion papers) (see references 14-17) All texts make up a corpus of 79400 running words, with two sub-corpora relatively equal in size (see Table 1), which can be considered as more or less appropriate since it is difficult to obtain an absolute balance for texts coming from two different resources
Table 1 Total size of the corpus
Type of texts No of words in English ADB Texts 42 097
WB Texts 37 303 TOTAL 79 400
2.2 Data Analysis
Once the corpus was built, segments of nominalised constructions were then extracted In this investigation, only nominalisations with the suffix -ATION (or -ATION nominals) were extracted from the corpus Based on the cognitive tenets suggested by Hamawand [6], Katamba [7], and Plag [8], three major semantic categories of metaphorical meaning expressed by nominalised forms can
be identified, including
- The act of doing what is referred to, or described, by
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the verbal root;
- The process of doing what is referred to, or described,
by the verbal root;
- The result of the act of doing what is referred to, or
described, by the verbal root
These categories facilitate a further break-down into
sub-categories presented later on in this paper
3 -ATION Nominals and Metaphorical
Representations in English Official Texts
3.1 Identification of –ATION Nominals
Nominalisations in English in general and those
with -ATION in particular, can be identified based on their
morpho - syntactical features In fact, from the
morphological perspective, by looking at the nominal
suffixes, one can identify the noun which has derived from
a verb Syntactically, nominalisations or de-verbal nouns,
first of all, are found to be collocated with a range of
different grammatical categories They can be preceded by
determiners (i.e the, a, an), by quantifiers (e.g some, few,
many), and post-modified by a prepositional phrase, and
in these nominal constructions, the de-verbal noun often
functions as head Like other nouns, nominals
with -ATION can be classified into count and non-count
categories Besides, they can perform other typical nominal
attributes: they can be the subject of a sentence, or an object
of a verb or of a preposition It can be argued that, it is the
way a nominalisation co-occurs with other linguistic
elements in the whole nominalised form that incorporates
additional metaphorical meanings This joint occurrence
with other elements in the lexico-grammatical domain is
important in marking the incongruent representation of
grammatical metaphorical meaning Below are some
nominal attributes of -ATON nominals
3.1.1 Nominal Attributes of -ATION Nominals
Like other nouns, nominals with -ATION can take all
nominal functions They can be nominative, taking the
function of the subject as in (1)
(1) Financial negotiations shall include classification
of tax liability in the borrower’s country [10]
Alternatively, they can function as the object of a verb
as in (2), and of a preposition as in (3)
(2) … seek clarification from the borrower [10]
(3) … for practical application [16]
Besides functioning as the object, nominals
with -ATION can take attributive position, functioning as
a noun modifier or attributive noun as in compensation
payments [14], and valuation method [17], for example
They can also, however, take nouns or adjectives as
pre-modifiers, as can be seen in the following examples:
(4) urban-rural segmentation [15] (pre-modified by an
adjective)
(5) gender discrimination [15] (pre-modified by a noun)
Regarding number, nominals with -ATION can be
characterised as belonging to count and/or non-count
categories This means that, nominals with -ATION can be
pluralised by the suffix -s, as can be seen in policy
recommendations [17], or career expectations [14]
Alternatively, they can be quantified by means of numerals
as the use of six in six main considerations [10], or by means of quantifiers as the use of some in some broad
observations [16]
An overview of the nominal attributes inherent with -ATION nominals now leads to further discussion on the level of markedness by means of the morpho-syntax of nominalisations and how it can help with the identification
of the metaphorical representation of nominals with -ATION However, the identification of nominalisations, as Thompson [9, 29] observes, is not always clear-cut With nominals derived from verbs, there
is a cline from most ‘noun-like’ to most ‘verb-like’ This complexity can be illustrated with examples as follows
(6) Six main considerations guide ADB’s policy on the
selection process [10]
In (6), the nominalisation refers to a set of criteria that
governs the selection process by ADB with little sense of
an event being represented However, in (7), the
nominalised form shows the real act of considering
(7) In the case of contracts not subject to prior review
by ADB, the communication will be sent to the
borrower for due consideration [10]
Being able to understand this complexity necessitates the analysis of the various representations of grammatical metaphor by nominals with -ATION
3.1.2 ‘Markedness’ and Metaphorical Representation
of -ATION Nominals
As presented earlier, the nominal attributes characteristic of nominals with -ATION are found in their relation with other grammatical categories in a nominalised construction This so-called degree of markedness, first of all, can be seen in the way de-verbal nouns collocate with
a determiner (often the definite article the) and a
prepositional phrase
a With a determiner
In fact, nominals with -ATION can take a definite
article (i.e a, an) and/or an indefinite article the as
determiner By taking a definite article, nominals
with -ATION often denote the Result meaning, for example, the product of translating as in an English
translation [10], or the product of evaluating as in a bid evaluation [10], or the result of explaining as in to provide
an explanation [12] However, when preceded by an
indefinite article, nominals with -ATION often have the
most abstract meaning the act of certifying as in the
certification usually covers quality, quantity and
reasonableness of price [12]
b With a determiner and a prepositional phrase
When taking both a pre-modifier (i.e the definite
article the) and a post-modifier (i.e a prepositional phrase),
nominals with -ATION denote the most abstract meaning
of the Act domain, showing the act of doing what the verbal
stem indicates or the process of doing this The
complement to the preposition following the de-verbal
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noun tells the participants in this material process which
has been turned into a thing via nominalisation
(8) … in the administration of the contract [12]
(9)…for the implementation of complex projects [10]
c With a preposition
When functioning as the object of a preposition,
nominals with -ATION can occur with or without the
definite article the, being post-qualified by a prepositional
phrase with another noun functioning as the affected or the
beneficiary as in (12), or the agent of the process involved
as in (13):
(10) After notification of award … [10]
(11) Due to migration of workers … [17]
Clearly, we can see the indication of the agent by means
of a by-phrase, and that of the affected /beneficiary by
means of an of-/ for-/ with–phrase:
(12)… the participation by ADB in the capital [11]
(13) … reduced participation by provincial authorities
and limited exploitation of local knowledge [17]
d With plurality
Nominals with -ATION can also be marked by their
plural forms as mentioned earlier, especially those in the
Result domain showing entities or things, or what has been
produced or accomplished out of the process involved by
the verbal stem A few examples among these
pluralised -ATION nominals are applicable laws and
regulations [10], or technical specifications [12]
The description above shows the relation between the
level of markedness and the identification of grammatical
metaphorical meaning of -ATION nominals This
markedness is shown via the collocation of de-verbal nouns
with determiner, preposition, plurality and other
morpho-syntactic attributes attached to nominalised constructions,
which is important in understanding the metaphorical
meanings embedded in-ATION nominals
3.2 Metaphorical Representation of -ATION Nominals
In order to identify the metaphorical representation
of -ATION nominals, it is important to note that the
metaphorical meaning of a nominalised form stretches
along a spectrum from being more ‘verb-like’ to being
more ‘noun-like’ [9, 29] Being more verb-like, a
nominalisation often denotes a process including the
period of time during which the act referred to by the verbal
root is executed, or refers to the activity which occurs from
beginning to end Nominalisations of this type are coded as
representing a Process which is broken down to either
Activity or Process-Time The Activity meaning is normally
marked by its syntactical role of being the object to a
transitive verb as seen in (14) whereas the Process meaning
of the nominalisation can be signposted with the
co-occurrence of a preposition (often for or during) that
precedes the nominalisation as in (15) even with the lexical
item process as in (16):
(14) ADB may enter into discussion where it deems
necessary to conduct investigations, audit, evaluation
or other assessments of the procurement process [12]
(15) This should be accompanied by a list of proposed
insurance coveragesfor both implementation and operation of the project [11]
(16) Pilots on how to incorporate public and business
consultation processes should be implemented [17]
When it is more noun-like, a nominalisation may denote
an entity or a thing (e.g invitations; qualifications; obligations); an agency or body of people (e.g organisation, association); an amount or sum of money (e.g compensation); or a document (e.g evaluation; translation; documentation), which means things which are produced, created or accomplished Nominalisations of this type often belong to the Result category, thus being quantifiable or pluralised (e.g trade negotiations, policy recommendations) There are interesting cases of -ATION nominals which have some bearing of a feature or attribute normally identified by means of a de-adjectival noun For example
(17) … for tasks that represent a natural continuation
of previous work carried out by the firm [10]
Besides the Process and the Result type, a large
proportion of de-verbalised nouns in the corpus are found
to belong to the Act category This Act domain can be coded with the meaning of Action as in (18), Area of
Activity as in (19)
(18) A number of specific topics or modules can help improve the development of value chains and the
participation of the poor in value chains [17]
(19) Compensation, Support and Resettlement
Councils [17]
Also to this Act type belong nominalisations that derive
from a verbalisation These de-verbalised nouns often
indicate a trend or phenomenon like the cases of
commercialisation illustrated in (20)
(20) Agricultural commercialisation refers to the
transition from subsistence or “own” production to a complex production and consumption system [17] Other nominalisations such as globalisation, industrialisation, modernisation, urbanisation, and the like
are also found in the corpus
3.3 Distribution and Metaphorical Representation
of -ATION Nominalsin the Corpus
3.3.1 –ATION Nominals in ADB Texts
With -ATION nominals out of the three categories the
Process type forms the largest proportion (with 299
occurrences) of the metaphorical representation as shown
in the corpus of ADB texts, followed by the Result and then the Act type (with occurrences of 202 and 150,
respectively) (see Figure 1)
In the two types of Process nominalisations (Activity and Process-Time), occurrences of the Activity type are
found to be more common with 264 tokens compared with only 35 occurrences of its counterpart sub-categorisation –
Process-Time
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Figure 1 -ATION nominals in ADB Texts
Regarding the Act type, the data show that Action
nominals are the most frequent with as many as 112
occurrences out of the total 150 tokens of the Act type This
high representation may be attributed to the tendency
towards converting a verbal form into a nominal one where
the incorporation of a more noun-like meaning is necessary
to indicate a new associated metaphorical meaning Area of
Activity is another sub-type of the Act family, representing a
totally noun-like shape of meaning in a very abstract domain
and making up only more than one-fifth of the entire Act
category (with 32 tokens) while a modest 6 occurrences are
found with Concept, Approach, or Trend signaling the
process of nominalisation from a verbalisation
Of the three categories, the Result type shows the most
diverse, and complicated nuances of metaphorical
meaning It is necessary to note that the interpretation of
the metaphorical meaning attached to these nominalised
constructions may be subjective and may require
justification by the researcher However, the generalisation
of these manifestations is needed and thus five main
sub-categories were identified The most common sub-category
is Things Created, Produced, or Accomplished (75
occurrences) – or, put it more simply, ‘a thing’ or ‘a
document’, or ‘an achievement’, followed by Things
Requested or Agreed with 59 occurrences This common
representation may result from the fact that the
communicative aim of ADB official documentation is
often to underline the commitment between this bank and
its Vietnamese partner regarding loans or any other
financial aid agreements The comparatively lower
representation of Agency or Body (18 occurrences) and
Sum or Amount (11 occurrences) is interesting also since
this grammatical meaning is unlikely to be deduced from
the Act meaning of its nominalised morpheme -ATION
The distribution of nominalised -ATION in WB official
documentation shows a rather different pattern and is
presented in what follows
3.3.2 –ATION Nominals in WB Texts
In the WB texts the Act type is the most dominant with
241 occurrences, followed by the Process type, and last of
all the category of Result (225 and 162, respectively), as
seen in Figure 2 The order of priority is the reverse of that
found in the ADB texts
Interestingly, the Act type corresponding to Concept,
Approach, and Trend (with 122 occurrences) outstrips the
other sub-types Action closely follows with 111
occurrences and Area of Activity has only 8 occurrences,
both making up less than half of the corpus samples
Figure 2 -ATION nominals in WB texts
A similar pattern is repeated in the Process type as
compared with the distribution of the -ATION nominals
denoting Processin ADB texts, whereby nominalised forms denoting Activity showing the Activityin progress are
almost ten times more frequent than those denoting
Process-Time
It is interestingly found that between around 20 and 30 occurrences are almost equally distributed over 4 out of the
5 sub-categories subsumed to the Result type, and the
remaining Things Created, Produced, and Accomplishedtype comes out top with almost twice as
many occurrences (54) Details of the distributional pattern
of the Result type indicated by nominals with –ATION in
ADB and in WB texts are shown in Table 2
The difference in representation of grammatical meaning
as shown in the two sub-corpora may result from the fact that most WB texts are discussion papers in which new concepts and approaches are introduced to the beneficiary countries,
-ATION nominalised constructions denoting Concept,
Approach, and Trend (in the Act type)are the most
highly-represented sub-categories of all (122 occurrences) In the
Result category alone, Things Agreed or Requested, and Things Created or Produced together make up the largest
share of their respective sub-corpora
Table 2 -ATION nominals in the Result type in WB texts
4 Conclusion
Regarding metaphorical meaning, -ATION nominals show a cline in representation from being most verb-like to being most noun-like When embracing the verb-like
meaning, they tend to denote the Action taken by the verbal
stem When embodying the noun-like meaning, they
indicate the Result This Result meaning denotes the
fruition of the whole process or period of time during which the action of the verbal root has occurred Nominals that stretch along the cline, showing the whole period of time involved for the action to take place and to complete,
RESULT type in ADB and WB texts Metaphorical
Representation
Occurrences
in ADB Texts
Occurrences
in WB Texts
Things Created, Produced,
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are characterised as the Process type, andcanbe
sub-categorised into Activity and Process-Time types The
nominalised construction also represents the meaning of a
concept, an approach, or a trend, which can be visualised
as a step further away from this cline to reflect an abstract
embodiment of the metaphorical meaning
Table 3 Distribution of metaphorical representations
of N-GMs in the corpus
Metaphorical
Representation
Number of Occurrences -ATION in
ADB texts
-ATION in WB texts
PROCESS 299 225
RESULT 202 162
There are various representations of -ATION nominals
in English official texts, and quantitative data have been
provided to substantiate this claim The metaphorical
representations of nominals with -ATION were classified
into three broad categories –the Act, the Process, and the
Result – under each category there are sub-types which add
up to ten sub-categories in total
Some minor variation exists in the representation of
metaphorical meaning of nominalised in different
sub-corpora (See Table 3) While the Process meaning
expressed by nominals with -ATION has the highest
frequency in the ADB texts, it is overtaken by the Act type
in the WB texts The Act type is then the least represented
in the ADB texts whereas the fewest occurrences in the WB
texts belong to the Result type These differences might lie
in the semantics of the texts which determines which
category of metaphorical meaning is represented the most
– the Act, the Process, or the Result They might also lie in
the type of text - guidelines and reports released by the
ADB and the discussion papers by the WB – whereby a
tendency has been recognised in the latter that -ATION as
a nominaliser has been embedded in the nominalised
constructions to denote the meaning of the result of the act
of doing what is referred to by the verbal root
REFERENCES
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https://openknowledge.worldbank.org
[14] Discussion Paper No.6 ‘The Emerging Communications Strategy: Engaging and Connecting People’ (5 231 words) Available online
at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org
[15] Discussion Paper No.10 ‘Labor Market Segmentation and Poverty Policy’ (5 993 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org
[16] Discussion Paper No.12 ‘How can research-based development interventions be more effective at influencing policy and practice?’ (6 659 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org
[17] Discussion Paper No.14 ‘Industrial and Commercial Land Market - Processes and their Impact on the Poor’ (15 138 words) Available
online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org
(The Board of Editors received the paper on 05/03/2015, its review was completed on 05/20/2015)