Nominalization in articles of educational studies a systemic functional analysis

Basing on the theory of functional grammar developed byHalliday, this thesis aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in the articles of Educational Studies.. With the corpus

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

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

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English linguistics Code: 60220201

Supervisor: Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm, PhD

HANOI – 2015

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

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 thecompletion of the study

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Nominalization is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon in English, especially in Englishwriting As a universal characteristic of human language, nominalization has attractedinterests of many linguists Basing on the theory of functional grammar developed byHalliday, this thesis aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in the articles

of Educational Studies With the corpus of 5 research articles extracted from thejournal Educational Studies, the author has made an attempt to show the distribution ofnominalization in the articles and carry out an analysis in terms of ideational,interpersonal and textual metafunctions Additionally, the paper tries to examine thepossible effects of nominalization in academic discourses The author hopes that thispaper will yield some insights and contribute to the studies of grammatical metaphor

In addition, implications for teaching and translating academic discourses would beoffered in this thesis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration ……… i

Acknowledgements ……… ii

Abstract ……… iii

Table of contents ……… iv

List of abbreviations ……… vi

List of tables and figures ……… vii

PART A: INTRODUCTION ……… 1

1 Rationale ……… 1

2 Aims of the study ……… 2

3 Scope of the study ……… 2

4 Significance of the study ……… 2

5 Design of the study ……… 2

PART B: DEVELOPMENT ……… 4

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 4

1.1 Nominalization ……… 4

1.1.1 Notion of nominalization ……… 4

1.1.2 Nominalization classification ……… 5

1.1.3 Nominalization in the view of Systemic Functional Grammar and as grammatical metaphor ……… 13

1.2 Related studies ……… 17

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY ……… 19

2.1 Corpus compilation ……… 19

2.2 Data collection procedure ……… 19

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2.2.1 Data analyzing instruments and methods ……… 20

2.2.2 Analytical framework ……… 20

CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ……… 23

3.1 Realization of nominalization in the five articles of Educational Studies … 23

3.1.1 Distribution of nominalization ……… 23

3.1.2 Distribution of nominalization subtypes ……… 24

3.1.3 Nominalization in terms of ideational metafunction ……… 25

3.1.4 Nominalization in terms of interpersonal metafunction ………… 27

3.1.5 Nominalization in terms of textual metafunction ……… 29

3.2 Possible effects of nominalization ……… 32

3.2.1 Creating objectivity ……… 32

3.2.2 Enhancing conciseness ……… 33

3.2.3 Creating formality ……… 34

3.2.4 Enhancing cohesion ……… 36

3.3 Summary ……… 36

PART C: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS ……… 37

1 Recapitulation ……… 37

2 Implications for teaching and translating English academic writing ………… 37

2.1 Teaching English academic writing ……… 37

2.2 Translating English academic discourse ……… 38

3 Limitations and suggestions for further studies ……… 38

REFERENCES ……… 40

APPENDIX 1

APPENDIX 2

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Page

Table 3: Ideational realization of nominalization 25

Figure 6: Analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme 22Figure 7: Distribution of nominalization subtypes 24Figure 8: Interpersonal realization of nominalization 27Figure 9: Textual realization of nominalization 29

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Nominalization is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon that is commonly seen inacademic discourses As one type of academic discourse, English research article ischaracterized by its reliance on nominalized structures Undeniably, formality andencapsulation are two principal features of academic writing discourse These onescould be achieved with the use of nominalization The frequent use of nominalizationrenders greater degree of texts‟ formality and objectiveness Both Halliday(1994/2000) and Ure (1997) think that nominalization is closely related to textformality As Halliday (1994) points out that “the nominal group is the primaryresource use by the grammar for packing in lexical items at high density” (Halliday,1994:351) Ure (1997) also holds the viewpoint that lexical density might be a normused for measuring degree of text formality She maintains that the higher the lexicaldensity 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 importantrole of encapsulation (Thompson, 2000) Understanding the nature and characteristics

as well as the roles of nominalization in English academic discourse would make greatcontribution to the perception of this discourse genre, which are necessary for academicwriters Thus, it is of great necessity to conduct a study on the phenomenon ofnominalization in academic discourses if we want to learn more about this importantvariety of English and benefit the reading and writing of English academic discourses,especially research articles In this thesis, the writer attempts to explore hownominalization is realized in English articles with the hope that it will help readersrecognize the importance of nominalization for the comprehension and this genre

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2 Aims of the study

In this study, the writer aims at investigating how nominalization is realized in fiveEnglish research articles of the journal Educational Studies More specifically, theauthor will classify nominalizations in the articles, and give a description of theircharacteristics 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 ofsystemic functional grammar in the corpus of English research articles extracted fromtwo latest volumes of the journal Educational Studies

4 Significance of the study

The author hopes that this paper will yield some insights into nominalization inacademic discourse, especially in research articles Additionally, the study might offersome suggestions for teaching academic writing and translating academic discourses

An academic writing would be more formal and concise with the high frequency ofnominalization occurring in the writing Finally, with the results of this study, readerscan find common types of nominalization appearing in articles as well as their effects,which might be useful for those who write research articles

5 Design of the study

Following is the construction of the study

Chapter 1 – Theoretical background: provides the background of the study, includingdefinition of key concepts, theories, and review of related studies.

Chapter 2 – Methodology: describes the corpus compilation and data collectionprocedure Data analyzing methods and instruments and analytical framework are alsoclearly presented in this chapter

Chapter 3 – Findings and Discussion: presents, analyzes and discusses the findings thatthe researcher found out in order to answer the research questions

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PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1 Nominalization

1.1.1 Notion of nominalization

Linguists might have different definitions of nominalization In Routledge Dictionary

of Language and Linguistics (Bussmann, 1996), broadly speaking, nominalizationrefers to every derivation of nouns from another word class Narrowly speaking,nominalization refers to productive process of word formation through which words ofall word classes can be used as nouns (Bussmann, 1996: 804) In Longman Dictionary

of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (2002), nominalization is defined as thegrammatical process of forming nouns from other parts of speech, usually verb oradjective (Richards and Schmidt, 2002: 395)

Aarts (1982) defines the nominalization as a process of turning a non-nominal elementinto 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 oradjectives 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 ornoun 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 onlyinvolves the change of form and grammatical categories Routledge Dictionary ofLanguage and Linguistics and Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and AppliedLinguistics focus on the derivation of the words, but these two definitions have a widerand unclear range All these definitions are all concerned about the changes of thelexical 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 canfunction as a noun phrase” (Li and Thompson, 1982:575)

According to Halliday (1985), nominalization refers to any element of group that canfunction as nouns or noun groups in a clause, including clauses, nominalized adjectives

or verbs, etc Nominalization “is the single most powerful resource for creatinggrammatical metaphor” (Halliday 2004b:656) Through nominalization, processes(linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, in general, asadjectives) are re-construed metaphorically as nouns, enabling an informationallydense discourse

can be distinguished as: nominalizations at the level of the word (e.g teacher),

nominalizations which nominalize a structure that lies in between a verb and a full

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clause (Sam's washing the windows) and, finally, nominalizations consisting of full clauses (e.g that Sam washed the windows).

In Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991), three types of nominalization are proposed:

 Action nominalization nominalizes a verb with no accompanying arguments

(actants), creating a new lexical item which designates a generic type of action or event

 Factive nominalization nominalizes a verb along with all of its actants except

the subject, these are also called “participles” or “gerunds” This creates an instance of anevent not uniquely identified or “located in conceptual space”

 Sentential nominalization nominalizes a verb along with all of its actants

including the subject This creates an instance of an event distinguished from all otherslocated for the listener in conceptual space

According to Chomsky (1970), among the various types of nominal expressions inEnglish, there are two types of particular importance including gerundivenominalization and derived nominalization For example, corresponding to thesentence “John has refused the offer.” we have the gerundive nominal of “John‟srefusing the offer” and the derived nominal of “John‟s refusal of the offer”

According to Comrie & Thompson (2007), nominalization is divided into two maintypes: lexical nominalization and clausal nominalization

1) Lexical nominalization is a derivational process that creates nouns from

lexical verbs and adjectives, and the resulting nouns become the head nouns in a nounphrase (Comrie & Thompson, 2007) Derivational nominalization: According to Biber et al(2002), derivational nominalizations are ones derived from verbs and

adjectives Most derived nouns are abstract in meaning This type of nominalization isformed by adding suffixes to the roots Nominalizing suffixes in English are listedbelow; the symbols V and A in the list show whether the noun is derived from a verb

or an adjective respectively

-age (various meanings) baggage, wastage, postage,

orphanage-al action or instance of V-ing arrival, burial, denial, proposal-an, -ian nationality, language, etc American, historian, Korean,

Victorian-ance, -ence action or state of V-ing, assistance, resemblance,

state of being A experience, dependence,

difference, ignorance-ant, -ent a person who V-s, something assistant, consultant, student,

used for V-ing coolant, intoxicant, lubricant-cy state or quality of being A/N accuracy, adequacy, infancy,

lunacy-dom state of being A/N boredom, freedom, stardom,

wisdom-ee a person (various meanings) absentee, devotee, employed,

trainee-er, -or a person/thing that V-s, actor, driver, filler, teacher, visitor,

footballer, cottager, New Yorker-ery, -ry (various non-personal bakery, bravery, refinery, robbery

meanings)-ese nationality or language Chinese, Japanese, journalese-ess a female N actress, baroness, tigress, waitress-ette a small N cigarette, kitchenette, novelette-ful amount that fills a N handful, mouthful, spoonful

-hood state of being A/N childhood, falsehood, likelihood-ician person concerned with N clinician, mathematician, physician-ie, -y a pet name for N auntie, daddy, doggie, Johnny

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-ing action/instance of V-ing, feeling, meeting, reading, training,

place or material building, crossing, landing, lining-ism ideology, movement, atheism, criticism, capitalism,

-ist follower of N/A-ism, atheist, capitalist, racist, physicist

specialist-ite citizen or follower of N Moabite, Muscovite, Thatcherite-ity state or quality of being A ability, activity, density, insanity-let a small N bomblet, booklet, leaflet, piglet-ment action or instance of V-ing argument, movement, statement,

treatment-ness state or quality of being A blindness, darkness, fairness,

happiness-ship state or skill of being a N friendship, membership,

relationship-tion action or instance of V-ing communication, education,

production-ure action or instance of V-ing closure, departure, exposure,

pressure(Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:90)

Deverbal nominalization can be: the agent of the verb (the nouns with suffixed: ant,

-er, -or, -ar), the patient of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -ee); the process and result

of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -age, -al, -ance, -tion, -ment), or the instrument ofthe verb (the nouns with suffixes: -age, -ant) De-adjectival nominalizations refer to:abstract concepts having the quality described by the adjectives (the nouns withsuffixes: -ity, -ness, -ism), or person having the quality described by the adjectives (thenouns with suffixes: -ist)

Another way to derive nouns from other word classes is known as conversion (or „zeroderivation‟) (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:91) In this type, no affix is added to the

base/ root, but the base itself is converted into a different word class, usually from averb or adjective into a noun For example:

Conversion Base Meaning(s) of Example of converted noun from converted noun

adjectives hopeful someone who is A presidential hopefuls

(A) white someone who is A they speak like the whites do in

the southsomething that is A you could see the whites of his

eyesverbs (V) catch act of V-ing he took a brilliant catch (sport)

something that is V-ed they had a fine catch of fish

something used for V- he loosened the catch and

cheat someone who V-s …accused him of being a cheat walk act of V-ing we can go for a walk later

way of V-ing the walk of a gentleman

place for V-ing the walk stretched for 154 miles

(Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:91)

2) Clausal nominalization: Clausal nominalization is a process by which a

prototypical verbal clause […] is converted into a noun phrase (Givón, 1990: 498).According to Givón (1990: 498), clausal nominalization refers to any finite or non-finite clause which functions as a noun in a clause These kinds of clauses, complement

clause, include that-clause, wh-clause, to-infinitive clauses, and V-ing clause (Lock,

1996) For examples:

- That Aristotle appealed to such principles is not surprising 9

- Really understanding this aspect of grammar needs a fair bit of work.

In addition to the four main types, there are two less productive types of complement

clause: bare-infinitive clauses, which are a special type of infinitive clause, and clauses which are rare Both of them are non-finite clauses (Biber, Conrad, & Leech,

ed-2002:308) For examples:

- The film would help identify participants at the weekend party.

- I got the door unlocked.

Complement clauses are also called nominal clauses, because they often occupy a nounphrase slot in a clause, such as subject, object or predicative

 That-clauses

That-clauses can appear in post-predicative position which is the most common type ofthat-clause, or serve as subject predicative and noun complements For examples:

- Most experts agree that drugs like heroin can cause permanent brain damage.

- It's a wonder that no one got hurt.

- The truth is that we don't know exactly how the disease is spread.

There are three types of wh-complement clauses: interrogative clauses, nominalrelative clauses, and exclamatives Interrogative clauses, nominal relative clauses use

the same wh-words, except that whether is used only with interrogatives Nominal

relative clauses can be paraphrased with a general head noun and relative clause

Exclamative wh-clauses begin with how + adjective or what as a pre-determiner (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:322) Exclamative wh-clauses are less common than

the other types

Wh-clauses can occur as subject, object, subject predicate or as complement of

adjectives, prepositions or nouns

- I was thinking how nice you are, what a good actor, and what a nice man.

- What he did was surprising.

- That‟s why I returned to the village.

- It was incredible what had happened to them.

- His parents were proud of what he had done.

- We have no knowledge of where it came from.

 To-infinitive clauses

To infinitive complement clauses are more common in the written register than inconversation They are used to report speech, mental states, intention, desires, efforts,perceptions, and other general actions They often occur in post-predicate and subjectpredicate position However, they can also occur in the subject position and inextraposed construction, or function as nouns complement (Biber, Conrad, & Leech,2002:328) For examples:

- I‟m just trying to get away early.

- A fourth challenge is to develop management arrangement within hospital.

- I‟m not sure it‟s necessary to ask you not to pass any information on to the

Communist.

- To take away the profits of crime is one thing; to seize the assets that have no

connection with crime is another.

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- Last year the society‟s committee made a decision to relaunch in a bid to attract more members.

 V-ing clauses

Ing-complement clauses serve a wide range of functions They are often used with

verbs like begin, start, and stop to convey aspect However, they are also used to report

speech acts, cognitive states, perceptions, emotions, and other actions Ing-clauses arecommon in the written registers like fiction, news and academic prose than inconversation (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:344) Ing-clauses most often occur inpost-predicate position In addition, they can occur in subject position or as subjectpredicates and noun complement For examples:

- He began paging through old newspapers.

- There is no reason why women should not be good at selling cars.

- Really understanding this aspect of grammar needs a fair bit of work.

- My uncle‟s hobby is collecting fish.

- He had no intention of singing at anyone’s twenty-first birthday.

In Systemic Functional Grammar, Halliday (1994/2000) considers nominalization as akind of grammatical metaphor

In this thesis, the way of classification according to Biber, Conrad, and Leech (2002) isemployed in combination with the classification of Systemic Functional Grammar inwhich nominalization is classified as a kind of grammatical metaphor

1.1.3 Nominalization in the view of Systemic Functional Grammar and as

grammatical metaphor

In Systemic Functional Grammar, language is understood as a system of meaningsaccompanied by certain forms, with which those meanings can be realized (Halliday,1994) From the point of view of the functions performed by a natural language, eachutterance encompasses three different levels of meaning: the ideational, interpersonal,and textual metafunctions In each metafunction, an analysis of a clause gives adifferent kind of structure composed from a different set of elements

In the ideational metafunction, a clause is analyzed into Process, Participants and Circumstances, with different participant types for different process types Types of

process in English are shown in the diagrammatic summary as in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Types of process in English (Halliday, 1994:108)

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The framework for interpreting the clause in its ideational function involves three steps(Halliday, 1994:343):

Selection of process type: material, mental, relational, etc

Configuration of transitivity functions: actor, goal, senser, etc

representing the process, its participants and any circumstantial element

Sequence of group-phrase clauses: verbal group, nominal group,

adverbial group, prepositional phrase, and their various sub-classes

Figure 2: Analysis in terms of transitivity

Variation in any of the selection can lead to ideational grammatical metaphor For

example, given “the fifth day saw them at the summit”, we can analyze either as in

Figure 3a or as in Figure 3b

Senser Mental: perception Phenomenon Place

Figure 3a: Analysis of metaphorical form (Halliday, 1994:346)

Figure 3b: Analysis of congruent form (Halliday, 1994:346)

In the interpersonal metafunction, a clause is analyzed into Mood and Residue, of

which the Mood element consists of two parts: Subject which is a nominal group and

Finite which is part of a verbal group The remainder of the clause is called the

Residue This analysis is presented in the following figure.

This thematic structure is illustrated as follows:

Figure 5: Analysis in terms of theme

For example:

the duke has given my aunt that teapot

my aunt has been given that teapot by the duke

that teapot the duke has given to my aunt

(Halliday, 1994: 38)

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Halliday (1985:321) considers that there are two kinds of expressions: congruent, alsocalled non-metaphorical or non-marked; and incongruent, metaphorical or marked Ingeneral, it is considered that people, places and things are realized by means of a noun,actions are realized verbally, circumstances are realized by prepositional phrases andadverbs This is the typical, congruent relationship between semantic and grammaticalcategories that usually happens in spontaneous spoken language However, allmeanings may have more than one way of realization, and sometimes in writtenlanguage, the realizations of the semantic functions of the clause are not typical, butmarked This realization constitutes a grammatical metaphor In other words,grammatical metaphors are alternative realizations in which certain meanings areexpressed through other grammatical means rather than the ones that have developedespecially for them Grammatical metaphor is a characteristic feature mostly of thewritten English According to Kies (1995), it occurs quite commonly in all types ofwritten English, from the informal varieties to the formal ones met in scientific andtechnical discourses According to Halliday (2004b), nominalization is the single mostpowerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor Through nominalization,processes (linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, ingeneral, as adjectives) are reconstrued metaphorically as nouns, enabling aninformationally dense discourse.

While treating nominalization as a grammatical metaphor, it is necessary to clarify how

a grammatical metaphor differs from a simple metaphor In tradition literacy criticism,metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another that

is not usually associated with it, e.g A man is a lion (Cuddon and Preston, 1998:507).

Meantime, grammatical metaphor is a part of lexical morphology (i.e nominalization)and deals with the meaning constructed in a different way by means of a different

grammatical construction, e.g the brakes failed = brake failure, when the verb failed

becomes the noun failure Here, the lexical items do not change in meaning but in

such a process as translate can be seen as an entity translation, which can function as a

nominal The fact that languages abound in nouns such as these shows thatgrammatical metaphor is a very important alternative in the presenting of information(Downing and Locke, 2002:152)

To conclude this part, grammatical metaphor, the substitution of one grammatical class

or structure for another, is a form of nominalization frequently met in academicdiscourse which has been identified and analysed by the linguist Halliday (1985, 1994)

1.2 Related studies

There have several been several studies on nominalization in some specific discoursessuch as medical, scientific and political discourses In the study “Nominalization as arhetorical device of academic discourse”, Su (2011) investigated how lexicalnominalization is used in the abstract sections of medical journal The data of the

research was taken from 96 abstracts extracted from two journals: New England Journal of Medicine and BioMed Central Medicine Also in terms of nominalization in

medical discourse, Wenyan (2011) did the research “Nominalization in medical papers:

A comparative study” With a corpus of discussion sections of 10 authentic medicalpapers by native English writers and 10 by Chinese academic writers drawn from veryinfluential medical journals, the author carried out a formal comparative analysis ofthree aspects: frequency of nominalization, lexical density The study “Nominalization

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in scientific discourse: A corpus-based study of abstracts and research articles” ofHoltz (2009) focused on the quantitative analysis of instances of nominalization in acorpus of research articles Emphasis was given to the discussion of the use ofnominalization in abstracts and research articles, across corpora and domains Theresults indicate that nominalization occurs much more often in abstracts than inresearch articles, and that the difference in this occurrence is statistically significant.Moreover, abstracts generally show a much wider vocabulary range concerning the use

of nominalization than their research articles With regard to nominalization in politicaldiscourse, Sarnackaite (2011) carried out the research “Nominalization as a cohesivedevice in political discourse” The author examined sixteen speeches of the politicians

drawn from 100 tops speeches of American rhetoric The conclusion that is drawn from

the study is that nominalization is the important part of political language that allowsthe politicians to categorize, label and describe phenomena efficiently and, whereby,contributes to the cohesion of their speeches by linking the text elements into aplausible unity Besides, the examples under analysis show that the common use ofnominalization not only makes the discourse more precise and objective but alsoachieves fluency of the text

In spite of the fact that there have been many studies on nominalization in differentkinds of discourse mentioned above, very few studies on nominalization in academicarticles have been conducted Furthermore, none of them takes data from articles of thejournal Educational Studies Therefore, the researcher hopes that this research couldprovide an in-depth analysis of nominalization in this writing genre

of social and educational foundations All the articles chosen for the corpus data areorganized with the parts of introduction, method, results and discussion To facilitatethe analysis process, the five articles are coded as I, II, III, IV, and V When taken asexamples in the thesis, the sentences are coded with two parts as follows: A_x, ofwhich A represents the article and x represents the line in that article For example:I_60 means that the example is taken from the article I, line 60 Besides, examplesexisting in more than two lines would be coded as A_x-y (x and y both represent thelines) For example: II_15-18 implies that the example is extracted from the article II,from line 15 to 18.

2.2 Data collection procedure

The procedure of data collection could be put into steps as follows Firstly, theresearcher identified nominalizations in the chosen articles For convenience ofanalyzing semantic roles of nominalization, just nominalizations functioning as headnouns in the nominal groups are selected Next, these nominalizations were categorized

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according to the analytical framework Then, the nominalizations were analyzed interms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions to identify their semanticroles.

2.2.1 Data analyzing instruments and methods

Content analysis is employed as the data analyzing instrument The analyzed data arethen interpreted both quantitatively and qualitatively For quantitative analysis, afteridentifying the nominalization in the corpus data, the author counted the occurrence ofnominalization and calculated their frequency in each article These statistics werepresented in the form of table to show the general trend of nominalization usagebetween the five articles Then, the distribution of types of nominalization wasexamined in percentage and illustrated by the table The following is the exploration ofthe semantic roles of nominalization realized in the five texts seen from the point ofview of metafunctions The statistics related to nominalization‟s semantic roles wereillustrated by tables and graphs For qualitative analysis, the statistics taken from thedata would be interpreted to find out the characteristics as well as the effects ofnominalization used in the educational articles Each case of nominalization is closelyanalyzed using the analytical framework

Categories

-al: arrival, -ance: assistance, -ence: difference, -ant: assistant,

DV -ent: student, -ee: trainee, -er: driver, -or: visitor, -ing: feeling,

Lexical -ment: argument, -tion: education, -ure: closure

WH What he did was surprising.

nominali- We have no knowledge of where it came from.

zation I‟m just trying to get away early.

TO A fourth challenge is to develop management arrangement

within hospital.

VING He began paging through old newspapers.

My uncle‟s hobby is collecting fish.

Table 1: Classification of nominalization

The next framework presents a sample of analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme according to the systemic functional grammar of Halliday (1994)

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Figure 6: Analysis in terms of transitivity, mood and theme

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CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

In this chapter, the results and findings revealed through the analysis of the collected data would be presented neatly

3.1 Realization of nominalization in the five articles of Educational Studies

3.1.1 Distribution of nominalization

The frequency of nominalization is obtained through the ratio between the total number

of nominalization and the total number of words in each text A frequency of 1/14, forexample, means that nominalization occurs on average once every 14 words of the text

To code the five chosen articles, each of them is assigned a number from I to V Thesummary of frequency of nominalization is presented in Table 2 below

Table 2: Distribution of nominalization

It could be seen from the Table 2 that the frequency of nominalization in the three firstarticles is a slightly higher than the rest In the articles I, II and III, nominalizationoccurs approximately once every 13 or 14 words, while occurring once every 12 and

18 words in the articles IV and V respectively The articles I, II and III contain fewerwords in comparison with the IV and V, but have higher frequency of nominalization,which implies that the more nominalization is used, the more succinct the textbecomes Although all the five articles have different frequency of nominalization, thedisparity among them is not great Thus, it could be concluded that the phenomenon of

nominalization is prevail in academic discourse like research articles, and is consideredone of the prominent characteristics for this type of discourse.

3.1.2 Distribution of nominalization subtypes

To find out the distribution of types of nominalization in the data corpus, the authorcategorizes nominalization according to the classification mentioned in the previoussection Details of all types of nominalization existed in the five texts are presented inthe Appendix 3 Below is the chart showing the distribution of types of nominalizationwith specific statistics

44.2 44.9

33.3 10%

As can be seen from the Figure 7, there exist all types of nominalization in all fivearticles It is clear that lexical nominalization comprising DV, DA and CV has higherratio compared with clausal nominalization consisting of THAT, WH, VING and TO.

Of four types of clausal nominalization, THAT and TO are the ones making up higherpercentage in comparison with the rest WH and VING As regards lexicalnominalization, the general trend of all the texts is using the large number of DV inwhich DV used in the articles II and III accounts for the highest proportion: 44.2% and44.9 % respectively Ranking second is CV with fairly high percentage which is nearlyequal to the percentage of DV Compared to DV and CV, the quantity of DA employed

in these articles is comparatively small, particularly with just 2.7% in the article I and2.9% in the article II In conclusion, most of nominalizations are derived from verbs,because by turning processes into nouns making clauses as heads, the speaker couldconvey entities and typically assume the existence of such entities Thesenominalizations could become participants or circumstances of other processes

3.1.3 Nominalization in terms of ideational metafunction

Different roles of nominalization in a clause would reveal different functions for thetext Roles of nominalization realized in the five articles in terms of ideationalmetafunction was investigated and summarized in the table 3 below:

Table 3: Ideational realization of nominalization

It is notably seen from the table, in terms of ideational metafunction, nominalizations

mostly play the role of circumstance (34.7% in the I, 44.55% in the II, 23.5% in the III,

31.6% in the IV and 24.1% in the V)

In many sentences of these research articles, it could be found that the frequency of

circumstances is fairly high For example:

“Siegel’s work has shown that “resilience can be learned through

experience”,

circumstance

and he picks out the key features of mindfulness strategies – approaching rather than avoiding difficult states, replacing rumination with observation based on

circumstance

curiosity and kindness , and the reflection on thoughts and feelings using

notation and labelling.” (IV_83-89)

According to Halliday (1994), circumstance serves as an expansion of something else.

In the examples above, the frequent use of circumstances makes the clauses lengthierand creates cohesion This is also prominent characteristic of academic discourse,which explains why understanding academic discourses seem to be quite challenging toalmost all of the readers

3.1.4 Nominalization in terms of interpersonal metafunction

I II III IV V

Figure 8: Interpersonal realization of nominalization

27

In terms of interpersonal metafunction, nominalizations appear as Subject, Complement or Adjunct of the process It is clearly seen from the Figure 8 that the

majority of nominalizations are realized as complement Particularly, nominalizationsfunctioning as complement make up more than 50% in each article III and V andnearly 50% in the article II and IV Ranking second is adjunct with 34.7%, 40.5%,23.9%, 30.1% and 24.4% in the article I, II, III, IV and V respectively Accounting forthe smallest proportion is nominalization playing the role of subject with around 20%

of the total

A complement is an element within the Residue that has the potential of being subject;

in other words, it is an element that has the potential for being given the interpersonallyelevated status of modal responsibility – something that can be the nub of theargument It is typically realized by a nominal group For example:

In the example above, the nominalization “categorisation” functioning as complement

in the clause has the potential of being subject like:

Eg4: “A process of mental categorisation is at the heart of stereotyping”.

When this nominalization plays the role of subject as in the example Eg4, theexpression of Eg4 becomes very normal with the usual sentence structure Nonetheless,

in the original version Eg3, inversion is used to make the nominalization

“categorisation” turn into complement and then the emphasis is on the prepositional