| Abstract [eng] |
The present paper shows the results of a corpus- based study of the language of British newspaper editorials. Nominalizations are usually related to the texts that require language economy and high information density. The aim of the study is to analyze British newspaper editorials with regard to the cohesive device – nominalization. The analysis is based on a corpus of 300 editorials drawn from on-line up-market British newspapers The Guardian, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph in the period from January 1, 2009 to December 1, 2009. The argumentative structures of newspaper editorials were researched within a framework of discourse analysis. Thus the collected examples were analyzed by employing critical discourse analysis and transformational methods. The results demonstrate that newspaper editorials represent a fairly formal style. A nominalization allows a notion which is verbal in origin to be transformed into a notion which is substantival. Moreover, nominalizations may depersonalize the agent. Due to the fact that so much information is compressed in a single word or phrase, the use of nominalizations can cause ambiguity or obscurity. We may generalize that the more detached, depersonalized, static, compact, abstract, and implicit the text is meant to be, the more nominalizations are used by a journalist. |
