Explorations into Nominalization in International Political News Reports in English Newspapers

Nominalization is one of the essential characteristics of grammatical metaphor in systemic-functional linguistics.Halliday classifies grammatical metaphor into thirteen types,five of which are nominalizations.A statistical analysis of the distribution and features of five types of nominalization in 25 international political news reports in English newspapers,which are chosen at random,is conducted in this paper.The statistical results reveal that the nominalization of verbs occurs the most frequently to perform the function of conciseness,objectivity,formality and semantic expansion;the nominalization of adjectives occurs less frequently mainly to perform the function of objectivity and conciseness;and the nominalization of prepositions,conjunctions and zero occurs rarely.