Abstract

Nominalization is widely used in the linguistic academic papers and it has the potential to transform a complex sentence into a concise one, while abstracts in the linguistic papers are the condensation of the main content, so it is of great significance to analyze the phenomenon of nominalzation in the abstracts of linguistic academic papers. Based on the theory of grammatical metaphor, this paper attempts to figure out whether the five types of nominalization proposed by Halliday exist and further analyze which kind of function they perform. 40 academic papers will be collected, the five types of nominalzation will be identified and their frequency will be quantified. Finally, the detailed analysis about their functions will be made. After the analysis of the data, the author found that verb nominalization is used most frequently, while proposition nominalization is relatively rare. And nominalization in the abstracts can serve several functions: adjective nominalization and verb nominalzation can reflect the objective facts without personal attitudes and stance; conjunction nominalization can make the abstracts more concise. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate different types of nominalization and their functions existing in the abstracts, and to promote authors’ awareness of nominalization and improve their abstract writing ability.

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