(Luận văn thạc sĩ) nominalization in articles of educational studies a systemic functional analysis

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 corpu

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

TO: To-infinitive clause

VING: Ving clause

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Page

Table 3: Ideational realization of nominalization 25

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

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

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2 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

4 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

5 Design of the study

Following is the construction of the study

Chapter 3 – Findings and Discussion: presents, analyzes and discusses the findings that the 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, 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

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- 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

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

 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 an event 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 others located for the listener in conceptual space

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

According to Comrie & Thompson (2007), nominalization is divided into two main types: 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 noun phrase (Comrie & Thompson, 2007) Derivational nominalization: According to Biber

et al (2002), derivational nominalizations are ones derived from verbs and

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adjectives Most derived nouns are abstract in meaning This type of nominalization is formed by adding suffixes to the roots Nominalizing suffixes in English are listed below; 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,

state of being A

assistance, resemblance, experience, dependence, difference, ignorance -ant, -ent a person who V-s, something

used for V-ing

assistant, consultant, student, 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

meanings)

bakery, bravery, refinery, robbery

-ese nationality or language Chinese, Japanese, journalese

-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

atheist, capitalist, racist, physicist

-ite citizen or follower of N Moabite, Muscovite, Thatcherite

-ity state or quality of being A ability, activity, density, insanity

-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 of the verb (the nouns with suffixes: -age, -ant) De-adjectival nominalizations refer to: abstract concepts having the quality described by the adjectives (the nouns with suffixes: -ity, -ness, -ism), or person having the quality described by the adjectives (the nouns with suffixes: -ist)

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

the south something that is A you could see the whites of his

eyes verbs (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 ing

V-he loosened tV-he catch and

opened the window

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

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- 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 noun phrase 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 of that-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

 Wh-clauses

There are three types of wh-complement clauses: interrogative clauses, nominal relative 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

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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 in conversation They are used to report speech, mental states, intention, desires, efforts, perceptions, and other general actions They often occur in post-predicate and subject predicate position However, they can also occur in the subject position and in extraposed 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 are common in the written registers like fiction, news and academic prose than in conversation (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002:344) Ing-clauses most often occur in post-predicate position In addition, they can occur in subject position or as subject predicates 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 a kind of grammatical metaphor

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

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):

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

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

(Halliday, 1994: 74)

In the textual metafuction, a clause is analyzed into Theme and Rheme Theme is the first constituent of the clause, and all the remainder of the clause is labeled Rheme

This thematic structure is illustrated as follows:

The first constituent The remainder

(Halliday, 1994: 38)

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Halliday (1985:321) considers that there are two kinds of expressions: congruent, also called non-metaphorical or non-marked; and incongruent, metaphorical or marked In general, 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 and adverbs This is the typical, congruent relationship between semantic and grammatical categories that usually happens in spontaneous spoken language However, all meanings may have more than one way of realization, and sometimes in written language, the realizations of the semantic functions of the clause are not typical, but marked This realization constitutes a grammatical metaphor In other words, grammatical metaphors are alternative realizations in which certain meanings are expressed through other grammatical means rather than the ones that have developed especially for them Grammatical metaphor is a characteristic feature mostly of the written English According to Kies (1995), it occurs quite commonly in all types of written English, from the informal varieties to the formal ones met in scientific and technical discourses According to Halliday (2004b), nominalization is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor Through nominalization, processes (linguistically realized as verbs) and properties (linguistically realized, in general, as adjectives) are reconstrued metaphorically as nouns, enabling an informationally 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

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 that grammatical 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 academic discourse 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 discourses such as medical, scientific and political discourses In the study “Nominalization as a rhetorical device of academic discourse”, Su (2011) investigated how lexical nominalization 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 medical papers by native English writers and 10 by Chinese academic writers drawn from very influential medical journals, the author carried out a formal comparative analysis of three 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” of Holtz (2009) focused on the quantitative analysis of instances of nominalization in a corpus of research articles Emphasis was given to the discussion of the use of nominalization in abstracts and research articles, across corpora and domains The results indicate that nominalization occurs much more often in abstracts than in research 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 political discourse, Sarnackaite (2011) carried out the research “Nominalization as a cohesive device 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 allows the politicians to categorize, label and describe phenomena efficiently and, whereby, contributes to the cohesion of their speeches by linking the text elements into a plausible unity Besides, the examples under analysis show that the common use of nominalization not only makes the discourse more precise and objective but also achieves fluency of the text

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

of social and educational foundations All the articles chosen for the corpus data are organized with the parts of introduction, method, results and discussion To facilitate the analysis process, the five articles are coded as I, II, III, IV, and V When taken as examples in the thesis, the sentences are coded with two parts as follows: A_x, of which 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, examples existing in more than two lines would be coded as A_x-y (x and y both represent the lines) 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, the researcher identified nominalizations in the chosen articles For convenience of analyzing semantic roles of nominalization, just nominalizations functioning as head nouns 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 in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions to identify their semantic roles

2.2.1 Data analyzing instruments and methods

Content analysis is employed as the data analyzing instrument The analyzed data are then interpreted both quantitatively and qualitatively For quantitative analysis, after identifying the nominalization in the corpus data, the author counted the occurrence of nominalization and calculated their frequency in each article These statistics were presented in the form of table to show the general trend of nominalization usage between the five articles Then, the distribution of types of nominalization was examined in percentage and illustrated by the table The following is the exploration of the semantic roles of nominalization realized in the five texts seen from the point of view of metafunctions The statistics related to nominalization‟s semantic roles were illustrated by tables and graphs For qualitative analysis, the statistics taken from the data would be interpreted to find out the characteristics as well as the effects of nominalization used in the educational articles Each case of nominalization is closely analyzed using the analytical framework

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

-ent: student, -ee: trainee, -er: driver, -or: visitor, -ing: feeling, -ment: argument, -tion: education, -ure: closure

DA -cy: accuracy, -dom: freedom, -hood: childhood

-ee: absentee, -ist: racist, -ity: ability, -ness: richness

We have no knowledge of where it came from

TO

I‟m just trying to get away early

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

NOMINALIZATION

Ideational metafunction

Interpersonal metafunction

Textual metafunction

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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, for example, 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 The summary 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 first articles is a slightly higher than the rest In the articles I, II and III, nominalization occurs 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 fewer words 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 text becomes Although all the five articles have different frequency of nominalization, the disparity among them is not great Thus, it could be concluded that the phenomenon of

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nominalization is prevail in academic discourse like research articles, and is considered one 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 author categorizes nominalization according to the classification mentioned in the previous section Details of all types of nominalization existed in the five texts are presented in the Appendix 3 Below is the chart showing the distribution of types of nominalization with specific statistics

Figure 7: Distribution of nominalization subtypes

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As can be seen from the Figure 7, there exist all types of nominalization in all five articles It is clear that lexical nominalization comprising DV, DA and CV has higher ratio 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 higher percentage in comparison with the rest WH and VING As regards lexical nominalization, the general trend of all the texts is using the large number of DV in which DV used in the articles II and III accounts for the highest proportion: 44.2% and 44.9 % respectively Ranking second is CV with fairly high percentage which is nearly equal 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 and 2.9% 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 could convey entities and typically assume the existence of such entities These nominalizations 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 the text Roles of nominalization realized in the five articles in terms of ideational metafunction 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:

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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 lengthier and creates cohesion This is also prominent characteristic of academic discourse, which explains why understanding academic discourses seem to be quite challenging to almost all of the readers

3.1.4 Nominalization in terms of interpersonal metafunction

Figure 8: Interpersonal realization of nominalization

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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, nominalizations functioning

as complement make up more than 50% in each article III and V and nearly 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 for the 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 interpersonally elevated status of modal responsibility – something that can be the nub of the argument 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, the expression 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

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phrase “at the heart of stereotyping” This creates uniqueness as well as formality for

the utterance

3.1.5 Nominalization in terms of textual metafunction

Figure 9: Textual realization of nominalization

As could be seen from the Figure 9, most nominalizations existing in all five articles

are realized in the position of rheme with the percentage ranging from 73.6% to 82.9% Nominalizations in the position of theme just account for a small proportion, around one forth compared with rheme Theme is the starting point for the message of the clause and realized by whatever element comes first Rheme is the rest of the clause

which provides the additional information added to the starting point and which is

available for subsequent development in the text (Halliday, 1994) Rheme often carries new information that needs to be judged by readers By using nominalization in rheme,

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the new information becomes something abstract and non-negotiable, which helps create preciseness for the research articles

It is commonly found that the relations between theme and rheme might create

cohesion in some cases The coherent text could be seen from how the information in the clauses goes on, that is the progression from theme to rheme in a clause This progression, according to Eggins (1994) is called thematic progression Danes (1974) and Eggins (1994) divide thematic progression into three patterns: simple linear progression, constant continuous theme, and theme progression with derived themes The following are models of these patterns:

(1) Simple linear progression

Theme 1 + Rheme 1;

↓

Theme 2 (= Rheme 1) + Rheme 2;

(2) Constant continuous theme

Theme 1 + Rheme 1;

↓

Theme 2 (= Theme 1) + Rheme 2;

(3) Theme progression with derived themes

Theme 1+ Rheme 1;

↑

[Hypertheme] → Theme 2 + Rheme 2;

In the corpus data of five research articles, most of nominalizations are realized in

rheme; however, some nominalization when being realized in theme make a great

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contribution to the textual cohesion for the texts The patterns employed in these five articles include pattern (1) simple linear progression and (2) constant continuous theme Some examples from the articles are extracted to illustrate this point:

Eg5: “Surprisingly, only a few studies have measured this These works,

however, do confirm that pre-service teachers hold stereotypic notions and negative attitudes toward middle school students and have a related low perception of the occupational status of teaching in the middle school setting.”

(I_29-32)

Eg6: “Mindfulness and education are beautifully interwoven Mindfulness is

about being present with and to your inner experience as well as your outer environment, including other people.” (IV_518-520)

Eg7: “However, interest does not terminate when a person comes to understand

an object Interest is the “moving force” in a process of broader developing

events, whose fruition is reached in action.” (V_261-264)

These examples above are structured according to the model of pattern (2) constant continuous theme In this model, the same theme enters into relation with a number of different rhemes The result of this type of thematic progression is that the themes in the text constitute a chain of co-referential items which extends through a sequence of clauses Additionally, in the data corpus of five research articles, the type of (1) simple linear progression is also employed as a means to keep the cohesion in the texts In linear thematic progression, the content of the theme of a second sentence derives from the content of the previous rheme For example:

Eg8: “In this paper, we examine student teachers’ beliefs in relation to their

discipline strategies Three clusters of discipline strategies are distinguished:

sensitive, directive and aggressive discipline strategies.” (II_5-8)