1 Introduction
Nominalization is a phenomenon which used widely in many languages and it is one ofthe most common characteristics in human language. Since language is an instrument torecognize the whole world, this important phenomenon in language may show somethingabout human cognition and have some rules.
In fact, the English learners usually meet such a pair of sentences.
(la) Emily knows that Bob loves her because she inherited money.
(1b) Emily knows the dependence of Bob's love for her upon her inheritance of money.
(2a) He is clever and all classmates of his know that.
(2b) His cleverness is known for all his classmates.
Sentence (la) is different from (1b). The primaryverbprocess "loves" and the minorverb process "inherited" in (la) are realized by the nominal group "Bob's love" and the noun"inheritance" in example (1b). In the same way, sentence (2b) is not the same as (2a) becausethe relational process or the attribute in (2a) is removed to the form "his cleverness". The useof nominalization can be seen in the two sentences (1b) and (2b). And such sentences are verypopular and common in both reading and writing process, so the present thesis is based on
this linguistic phenomenon.
This chapter includes the literature review, the purpose, need and the research questionsof the study. The present writer put literature review in this chapter in order to draw a clearpicture of the phenomenon of nominalization.
1.1 Literature Review
Halfiday (1994:342) holds the view that there is not any use of metaphor in childrenspeech, since grammatical metaphor (GM) is a kind of adult language. He thinks that GM cancreate complication in written language by increasing the lexical density in the process of
reading and writing. Halliday and Martin (1993:20) argue thatgrammatical metaphor is alanguage of a particular register. But it is insufficient to express and convey the whole world.There are also some other linguists hold the similar opinion that nominalizations do causesome difficulties in writing process and reading comprehension. Therefore, there appearseveral Chinese linguists and teachers who avoid using nominalization in their research andteaching process.
1.1.1 Definitions of Nominalization
Nominalization can be understood as a process and it is the mainsource from whichgrammatical metaphor derives. Nominalization is significant since it recognizes informationstructures in clause and text. According to Randolph Quirk (1985), nominalization is a noun
phrase which has a corresponding systemic relationship with a clause structure and whosehead noun is related to a corresponding verb or adjective morphologically. For example, thenoun phrase "his refusal to help", which corresponds to "he refuses to help", and whose head
noun "refusal" is related to the verb "refuse" morphologically, and this may be an example ofa nominalization.
As defined in Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics (Matthews 1997:244),"nominalization is any process by which either a noun or a syntactic unit functioning as anoun phrase is derived from any other kind of unit such as a verb or an adjective".
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