Towards a system of principles for identifying nominalizing metaphors

• Published in: Lingua Vol. 312; p. 103832
• Main Authors: Li, Wen, Yang, Bingjun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01-12-2024
• Subjects: Grammatical metaphor; Identification principle; Nominalization; Nominalizing metaphor; System; Nominalizing metaphor; Identification principle; Nominalization; Grammatical metaphor; System
• ISSN: 0024-3841
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2024.103832

•Nominalizing metaphors (NMs) are either morphological or non-morphological.•Morphological priority principle (MPP) moderates the overload of NMs.•The principles for identifying NMs complement one another.•NMs can be fully identified via the system of nominalizing metaphor.•NM is stratal realignment involving (non–) morphological nominalization.
In systemic functional linguistics, nominalization represents a prominent type of grammatical metaphor, but the identification of nominalization as nominalizing metaphor remains a problem. To distinguish nominalizations which are metaphorical from those which are not in English, texts from FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English) were observed by using UAM Corpus Tool. The results show that some of the nominalizations (e.g., technicalized nominalizations, event nouns, participant nominalizations, and nominal non-finite and finite clauses) are not grammatical metaphors under the principles of Rank Shift, Full Realization, or Semantic Junction. Non-morphological nominalizations in grammatical metaphor (e.g., the realization of a relator as a noun exemplified by if → condition) also remain unexplained, which may be solved by the Morphological Priority Principle prioritizing morphological agnation between the congruent and metaphorical wordings. None of the principles alone but a system synthesized from the four principles can sufficiently do for the identification of nominalizing metaphors.