-ATION nominals and their metaphorical representation in English official texts

Tóm tắt

In the domain of functional grammar, the term nominalisation refers to non-congruent metaphorical modes of expression, and is a predominant tendency characteristic of grammatical metaphor. Nominalisation is often considered as an alternative way of encoding verbal meanings, and is a prominent feature of written discourse. By means of nominalisation, a text tends to be more lexically-dense since nominalisations can perform important functions: deleting agency, turning processes into entities, or condensing long strings of shorter sentences into fewer longer sentences, thus making a text more succinct, more abstract, and more sophisticated.In this way, nominalisation can embed within its constructions several grammatical metaphorical meanings. This paper examines the metaphorical modes of expression by means of –ATION suffix. Based on an English corpus built of official texts, it looks at the identification of nominals with –ATION, their metaphorical meanings, and their distribution across two sub-corpora – ADB texts and WB texts. Some generalisations on the metaphorical representation of ATION nominals are then drawn, and quantitative data are provided to support the claims made on these metaphorical representations.