Towards a system of principles for identifying nominalizing metaphors

Abstract

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.