NOMINALISATION AS A FEATURE OF GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR
It is clear that a choice of transferred realizations such as these has as one result the loss of human agency, which is usually replaced by an abstraction related to the original Agent (government spending, foreign travel). A second result is an increase in lexical density: Nominal groups become long and heavy. For this reason, nominalization is the form of grammatical metaphor most consistently recognized under different labels. It distances us from the event, raising the representation of a situation to a higher level of abstraction. Once objectified and depersonalized in this way, the event or abstraction is conceptualized as if it had temporal persistence, instead of the transience associated with a verb.
At the same time, nominalizations are more versatile than verbs. The noun ‘explosion’ from ‘explode’ can carry out all the functions realized by nominals, such as a Subject or Direct Object (The explosion occurred at 6 a.m.; leaking gas caused an explosion). With this new status as a referent, a nominalization can give the impression that what it expresses is a recognized piece of information, whose validity is beyond dispute. Compare the following a extract from a news item with the non-nominalized b version:
a. Government spending showed positive growth in the last quarter in contrast to its sharp fall in the previous one.
b. The government spent much more in the last quarter than was planned, whereas it spent considerably less in the previous one.
As soon as we examine samples of more formal English – that used in specialized fields such as the natural sciences, the social sciences, politics, administration and business, finance and technology – we find a great number of such nominalizations. These tend to be abstract nouns derived from verbs and other parts of speech, which can encode quite complex meanings.
Lexical metaphor can occur together with grammatical metaphor, as illustrated by ‘growth’ and ‘fall’, so common in texts on economics. Here, grammar borders on lexis, and different languages have different means of visualizing one semantic function as if it were another. Here we can do no more than briefly outline some of the transfers of semantic functions. The ‘metaphorical’ forms are given first, with a basic corresponding meaning suggested in the right-hand column.
