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.
132 Le Thi Giao Chi -ATION NOMINALS AND THEIR METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION IN ENGLISH OFFICIAL TEXTS Le Thi Giao Chi University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Danang; giaochi0502@gmail.com Abstract - 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 Key words - metaphorical representation; nominalisation as grammatical metaphor; -ATION nominals; corpus; official texts Introduction Grammatical Metaphor (GM), a term coined by Halliday [2], is a feature of language whereby shift or movement of elements within the domain of lexico-syntactical grammar permits the change of linguistic functions, or the reconfigurations of ideational expressions The traditional concepts of metaphor are often restricted to the transfer from something literal (e.g the heart of a person) to something new in a figurative sense (e.g the heart of a city) whereas that of GM allows more than just this type of rhetorical representation Here, processes which are normally expressed by verbs tend to experience a lexico-semantic shift into things re-represented by de-verbal nouns (e.g from John wrote a letter to John’s writing a letter, or they drove rapidly down the hill to their rapid down-hill driving) These non-congruent metaphorical modes of expression are categorised in the domain of functional grammar by Halliday [2/3] and by Halliday and Matthiessen [4] as nominalisation, which 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 characterised by text density which is often achieved via nominalisation In fact, nominalisations perform important ideological functions such as deleting agency, turning processes into entities, or condensing long strings of shorter sentences into fewer longer sentences [1]; they can make a text more succinct, more abstract, and more sophisticated [9] Since languages differ in the way they express common ideational meanings, representations via nominalisation as grammatical metaphor can produce different ways of encoding For a full understanding of this linguistic phenomenon, it is important to explore this natural process of linguistic variations through which various metaphorical representations can be identified for better understanding the message incorporated in nominalised segments Being one of the most frequent nominalisers the -ATION suffix is added to verbs to derive nouns, as observed by Katamba [7, 59], or Harley [5, 123] The term -ATION nominals are used to refer to the whole nominalised segment formed by both the de-verbal noun and other linguistic constituents For example, the early phase of project implementation is labeled as a nominal with -ATION, comprising of a de-verbal noun implementation, an adjective early, nouns phase and process, and certain grammatical categories (i.e determiner the and preposition of) Corpus Building and Data Analysis 2.1 Corpus Building For this study, a corpus is built of English texts being official documents released by the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) The collected corpus represents a specific genre of language – that is the official discourse which is, like academic texts, assumed to be lexically dense and highly nominalised [8] The text size varies from around 282 words to 17 343 words, with three ADB texts (mainly reports and guidelines), and five WB texts (i.e discussion papers) (see references 14-17) All texts make up a corpus of 79400 running words, with two sub-corpora relatively equal in size (see Table 1), which can be considered as more or less appropriate since it is difficult to obtain an absolute balance for texts coming from two different resources Table Total size of the corpus Type of texts No of words in English ADB Texts 42 097 WB Texts 37 303 TOTAL 79 400 2.2 Data Analysis Once the corpus was built, segments of nominalised constructions were then extracted In this investigation, only nominalisations with the suffix -ATION (or -ATION nominals) were extracted from the corpus Based on the cognitive tenets suggested by Hamawand [6], Katamba [7], and Plag [8], three major semantic categories of metaphorical meaning expressed by nominalised forms can be identified, including - The act of doing what is referred to, or described, by THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG, JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, NO 6(91).2015 the verbal root; - The process of doing what is referred to, or described, by the verbal root; - The result of the act of doing what is referred to, or described, by the verbal root These categories facilitate a further break-down into sub-categories presented later on in this paper -ATION Nominals and Metaphorical Representations in English Official Texts 3.1 Identification of –ATION Nominals Nominalisations in English in general and those with -ATION in particular, can be identified based on their morpho - syntactical features In fact, from the morphological perspective, by looking at the nominal suffixes, one can identify the noun which has derived from a verb Syntactically, nominalisations or de-verbal nouns, first of all, are found to be collocated with a range of different grammatical categories They can be preceded by determiners (i.e the, a, an), by quantifiers (e.g some, few, many), and post-modified by a prepositional phrase, and in these nominal constructions, the de-verbal noun often functions as head Like other nouns, nominals with -ATION can be classified into count and non-count categories Besides, they can perform other typical nominal attributes: they can be the subject of a sentence, or an object of a verb or of a preposition It can be argued that, it is the way a nominalisation co-occurs with other linguistic elements in the whole nominalised form that incorporates additional metaphorical meanings This joint occurrence with other elements in the lexico-grammatical domain is important in marking the incongruent representation of grammatical metaphorical meaning Below are some nominal attributes of -ATON nominals 3.1.1 Nominal Attributes of -ATION Nominals Like other nouns, nominals with -ATION can take all nominal functions They can be nominative, taking the function of the subject as in (1) (1) Financial negotiations shall include classification of tax liability in the borrower’s country [10] Alternatively, they can function as the object of a verb as in (2), and of a preposition as in (3) (2) … seek clarification from the borrower [10] (3) … for practical application [16] Besides functioning as the object, nominals with -ATION can take attributive position, functioning as a noun modifier or attributive noun as in compensation payments [14], and valuation method [17], for example They can also, however, take nouns or adjectives as pre-modifiers, as can be seen in the following examples: (4) urban-rural segmentation [15] (pre-modified by an adjective) (5) gender discrimination [15] (pre-modified by a noun) Regarding number, nominals with -ATION can be characterised as belonging to count and/or non-count categories This means that, nominals with -ATION can be 133 pluralised by the suffix -s, as can be seen in policy recommendations [17], or career expectations [14] Alternatively, they can be quantified by means of numerals as the use of six in six main considerations [10], or by means of quantifiers as the use of some in some broad observations [16] An overview of the nominal attributes inherent with -ATION nominals now leads to further discussion on the level of markedness by means of the morpho-syntax of nominalisations and how it can help with the identification of the metaphorical representation of nominals with -ATION However, the identification of nominalisations, as Thompson [9, 29] observes, is not always clear-cut With nominals derived from verbs, there is a cline from most ‘noun-like’ to most ‘verb-like’ This complexity can be illustrated with examples as follows (6) Six main considerations guide ADB’s policy on the selection process [10] In (6), the nominalisation refers to a set of criteria that governs the selection process by ADB with little sense of an event being represented However, in (7), the nominalised form shows the real act of considering (7) In the case of contracts not subject to prior review by ADB, the communication will be sent to the borrower for due consideration [10] Being able to understand this complexity necessitates the analysis of the various representations of grammatical metaphor by nominals with -ATION 3.1.2 ‘Markedness’ and Metaphorical Representation of -ATION Nominals As presented earlier, the nominal attributes characteristic of nominals with -ATION are found in their relation with other grammatical categories in a nominalised construction This so-called degree of markedness, first of all, can be seen in the way de-verbal nouns collocate with a determiner (often the definite article the) and a prepositional phrase a With a determiner In fact, nominals with -ATION can take a definite article (i.e a, an) and/or an indefinite article the as determiner By taking a definite article, nominals with -ATION often denote the Result meaning, for example, the product of translating as in an English translation [10], or the product of evaluating as in a bid evaluation [10], or the result of explaining as in to provide an explanation [12] However, when preceded by an indefinite article, nominals with -ATION often have the most abstract meaning the act of certifying as in the certification usually covers quality, quantity and reasonableness of price [12] b With a determiner and a prepositional phrase When taking both a pre-modifier (i.e the definite article the) and a post-modifier (i.e a prepositional phrase), nominals with -ATION denote the most abstract meaning of the Act domain, showing the act of doing what the verbal stem indicates or the process of doing this The complement to the preposition following the de-verbal 134 noun tells the participants in this material process which has been turned into a thing via nominalisation (8) … in the administration of the contract [12] (9)…for the implementation of complex projects [10] c With a preposition When functioning as the object of a preposition, nominals with -ATION can occur with or without the definite article the, being post-qualified by a prepositional phrase with another noun functioning as the affected or the beneficiary as in (12), or the agent of the process involved as in (13): (10) After notification of award … [10] (11) Due to migration of workers … [17] Clearly, we can see the indication of the agent by means of a by-phrase, and that of the affected /beneficiary by means of an of-/ for-/ with–phrase: (12)… the participation by ADB in the capital [11] (13) … reduced participation by provincial authorities and limited exploitation of local knowledge [17] d With plurality Nominals with -ATION can also be marked by their plural forms as mentioned earlier, especially those in the Result domain showing entities or things, or what has been produced or accomplished out of the process involved by the verbal stem A few examples among these pluralised -ATION nominals are applicable laws and regulations [10], or technical specifications [12] The description above shows the relation between the level of markedness and the identification of grammatical metaphorical meaning of -ATION nominals This markedness is shown via the collocation of de-verbal nouns with determiner, preposition, plurality and other morphosyntactic attributes attached to nominalised constructions, which is important in understanding the metaphorical meanings embedded in-ATION nominals 3.2 Metaphorical Representation of -ATION Nominals In order to identify the metaphorical representation of -ATION nominals, it is important to note that the metaphorical meaning of a nominalised form stretches along a spectrum from being more ‘verb-like’ to being more ‘noun-like’ [9, 29] Being more verb-like, a nominalisation often denotes a process including the period of time during which the act referred to by the verbal root is executed, or refers to the activity which occurs from beginning to end Nominalisations of this type are coded as representing a Process which is broken down to either Activity or Process-Time The Activity meaning is normally marked by its syntactical role of being the object to a transitive verb as seen in (14) whereas the Process meaning of the nominalisation can be signposted with the cooccurrence of a preposition (often for or during) that precedes the nominalisation as in (15) even with the lexical item process as in (16): (14) ADB may enter into discussion where it deems necessary to conduct investigations, audit, evaluation or other assessments of the procurement process [12] Le Thi Giao Chi (15) This should be accompanied by a list of proposed insurance coveragesfor both implementation and operation of the project [11] (16) Pilots on how to incorporate public and business consultation processes should be implemented [17] When it is more noun-like, a nominalisation may denote an entity or a thing (e.g invitations; qualifications; obligations); an agency or body of people (e.g organisation, association); an amount or sum of money (e.g compensation); or a document (e.g evaluation; translation; documentation), which means things which are produced, created or accomplished Nominalisations of this type often belong to the Result category, thus being quantifiable or pluralised (e.g trade negotiations, policy recommendations) There are interesting cases of -ATION nominals which have some bearing of a feature or attribute normally identified by means of a de-adjectival noun For example (17) … for tasks that represent a natural continuation of previous work carried out by the firm [10] Besides the Process and the Result type, a large proportion of de-verbalised nouns in the corpus are found to belong to the Act category This Act domain can be coded with the meaning of Action as in (18), Area of Activity as in (19) (18) A number of specific topics or modules can help improve the development of value chains and the participation of the poor in value chains [17] (19) Compensation, Councils [17] Support and Resettlement Also to this Act type belong nominalisations that derive from a verbalisation These de-verbalised nouns often indicate a trend or phenomenon like the cases of commercialisation illustrated in (20) (20) Agricultural commercialisation refers to the transition from subsistence or “own” production to a complex production and consumption system [17] Other nominalisations such as globalisation, industrialisation, modernisation, urbanisation, and the like are also found in the corpus 3.3 Distribution and Metaphorical of -ATION Nominalsin the Corpus Representation 3.3.1 –ATION Nominals in ADB Texts With -ATION nominals out of the three categories the Process type forms the largest proportion (with 299 occurrences) of the metaphorical representation as shown in the corpus of ADB texts, followed by the Result and then the Act type (with occurrences of 202 and 150, respectively) (see Figure 1) In the two types of Process nominalisations (Activity and Process-Time), occurrences of the Activity type are found to be more common with 264 tokens compared with only 35 occurrences of its counterpart sub-categorisation – Process-Time THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG, JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, NO 6(91).2015 135 Figure -ATION nominals in ADB Texts Figure -ATION nominals in WB texts Regarding the Act type, the data show that Action nominals are the most frequent with as many as 112 occurrences out of the total 150 tokens of the Act type This high representation may be attributed to the tendency towards converting a verbal form into a nominal one where the incorporation of a more noun-like meaning is necessary to indicate a new associated metaphorical meaning Area of Activity is another sub-type of the Act family, representing a totally noun-like shape of meaning in a very abstract domain and making up only more than one-fifth of the entire Act category (with 32 tokens) while a modest occurrences are found with Concept, Approach, or Trend signaling the process of nominalisation from a verbalisation A similar pattern is repeated in the Process type as compared with the distribution of the -ATION nominals denoting Processin ADB texts, whereby nominalised forms denoting Activity showing the Activityin progress are almost ten times more frequent than those denoting Process-Time Of the three categories, the Result type shows the most diverse, and complicated nuances of metaphorical meaning It is necessary to note that the interpretation of the metaphorical meaning attached to these nominalised constructions may be subjective and may require justification by the researcher However, the generalisation of these manifestations is needed and thus five main subcategories were identified The most common sub-category is Things Created, Produced, or Accomplished (75 occurrences) – or, put it more simply, ‘a thing’ or ‘a document’, or ‘an achievement’, followed by Things Requested or Agreed with 59 occurrences This common representation may result from the fact that the communicative aim of ADB official documentation is often to underline the commitment between this bank and its Vietnamese partner regarding loans or any other financial aid agreements The comparatively lower representation of Agency or Body (18 occurrences) and Sum or Amount (11 occurrences) is interesting also since this grammatical meaning is unlikely to be deduced from the Act meaning of its nominalised morpheme -ATION The distribution of nominalised -ATION in WB official documentation shows a rather different pattern and is presented in what follows 3.3.2 –ATION Nominals in WB Texts In the WB texts the Act type is the most dominant with 241 occurrences, followed by the Process type, and last of all the category of Result (225 and 162, respectively), as seen in Figure The order of priority is the reverse of that found in the ADB texts Interestingly, the Act type corresponding to Concept, Approach, and Trend (with 122 occurrences) outstrips the other sub-types Action closely follows with 111 occurrences and Area of Activity has only occurrences, both making up less than half of the corpus samples It is interestingly found that between around 20 and 30 occurrences are almost equally distributed over out of the sub-categories subsumed to the Result type, and the remaining Things Created, Produced, and Accomplishedtype comes out top with almost twice as many occurrences (54) Details of the distributional pattern of the Result type indicated by nominals with –ATION in ADB and in WB texts are shown in Table The difference in representation of grammatical meaning as shown in the two sub-corpora may result from the fact that most WB texts are discussion papers in which new concepts and approaches are introduced to the beneficiary countries, ATION nominalised constructions denoting Concept, Approach, and Trend (in the Act type)are the most highlyrepresented sub-categories of all (122 occurrences) In the Result category alone, Things Agreed or Requested, and Things Created or Produced together make up the largest share of their respective sub-corpora Table -ATION nominals in the Result type in WB texts RESULT type in ADB and WB texts Metaphorical Representation Agency or Body Occurrences in ADB Texts 18 Occurrences in WB Texts 20 Property, Feature, or Others 39 32 Sum or Amount 11 29 Things Agreed or Requested 59 27 75 54 202 162 Things Created, Produced, or Accomplished Total Conclusion Regarding metaphorical meaning, -ATION nominals show a cline in representation from being most verb-like to being most noun-like When embracing the verb-like meaning, they tend to denote the Action taken by the verbal stem When embodying the noun-like meaning, they indicate the Result This Result meaning denotes the fruition of the whole process or period of time during which the action of the verbal root has occurred Nominals that stretch along the cline, showing the whole period of time involved for the action to take place and to complete, 136 Le Thi Giao Chi are characterised as the Process type, andcanbe subcategorised into Activity and Process-Time types The nominalised construction also represents the meaning of a concept, an approach, or a trend, which can be visualised as a step further away from this cline to reflect an abstract embodiment of the metaphorical meaning Table Distribution of metaphorical representations of N-GMs in the corpus Metaphorical Representation ACT PROCESS RESULT Total occurrences Number of Occurrences -ATION in -ATION in WB ADB texts texts 150 241 299 225 202 162 651 628 There are various representations of -ATION nominals in English official texts, and quantitative data have been provided to substantiate this claim The metaphorical representations of nominals with -ATION were classified into three broad categories –the Act, the Process, and the Result – under each category there are sub-types which add up to ten sub-categories in total Some minor variation exists in the representation of metaphorical meaning of nominalised in different subcorpora (See Table 3) While the Process meaning expressed by nominals with -ATION has the highest frequency in the ADB texts, it is overtaken by the Act type in the WB texts The Act type is then the least represented in the ADB texts whereas the fewest occurrences in the WB texts belong to the Result type These differences might lie in the semantics of the texts which determines which category of metaphorical meaning is represented the most – the Act, the Process, or the Result They might also lie in the type of text - guidelines and reports released by the ADB and the discussion papers by the WB – whereby a tendency has been recognised in the latter that -ATION as a nominaliser has been embedded in the nominalised constructions to denote the meaning of the result of the act of doing what is referred to by the verbal root REFERENCES [1] Billig, M (2008), The language of critical discourse analysis: the case of nominalisation, Discourse & Society, 19 (6), 783-800 [2] Halliday, M.A.K (1985), Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Arnold [3] Halliday, M.A.K (1994), Introduction to Functional Grammar Second Edition, London: Arnold [4] Halliday, M.A.K., and Matthiessen, C M.I.M (1999), Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition, London: Continuum [5] Harley, H (2006), English Words: A Linguistic Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell [6] Hamawand, Z (2008), Morpho-lexical Alternation in Noun Formation, London: Macmillan Palgrave [7] Katamba, F (2005), English Words – Structure, History, Usage Second Edition, London: Routledge [8] Plag, I (2003) Word Formation in English Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [9] Thompson, G (2010) “Grammatical metaphor and success in academic writing” In Hunston, S and Oakley, D (eds.), 27-34 [10] Guidelines on the Use of Consultants’ (12 020 words) Available online atwww.adb.org/ /guidelines-use-consultants-asia [11] ‘Private Sector Finance’ (12 734 words) Available at www.adb.org/site/private-sector-financing/main [12] 'Procurement Guidelines’ (17 343 words) Available online atwww.adb.org/ /procurement-guidelines [13] Discussion Paper No.4 ‘Making Market Systems Work Better for Poor Communes’ (4 282 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org [14] Discussion Paper No.6 ‘The Emerging Communications Strategy: Engaging and Connecting People’ (5 231 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org [15] Discussion Paper No.10 ‘Labor Market Segmentation and Poverty Policy’ (5 993 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org [16] Discussion Paper No.12 ‘How can research-based development interventions be more effective at influencing policy and practice?’ (6 659 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org [17] Discussion Paper No.14 ‘Industrial and Commercial Land Market Processes and their Impact on the Poor’ (15 138 words) Available online at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org (The Board of Editors received the paper on 05/03/2015, its review was completed on 05/20/2015) ... break-down into sub-categories presented later on in this paper -ATION Nominals and Metaphorical Representations in English Official Texts 3.1 Identification of ? ?ATION Nominals Nominalisations in English. .. nominalised constructions, which is important in understanding the metaphorical meanings embedded in -ATION nominals 3.2 Metaphorical Representation of -ATION Nominals In order to identify the metaphorical. .. various representations of -ATION nominals in English official texts, and quantitative data have been provided to substantiate this claim The metaphorical representations of nominals with -ATION