DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L319.405
Authors: Ms. Lei Yue
Abstract: Using a lot of nominalizations is one of the special features of academic discourses, because the employment of nominalizations can promote discourse cohesion, thus making discourse become coherent. However, cohesion itself can not only be reflected in the surface of language, it’s also important to investigate the process of establishing cohesive relations in the mind, and it deserves profound analysis. Therefore, based on Halliday’s definition of nominalization and categories of cohesion raised by Halliday and Hasan, this paper analyzed several cohesive patterns of nominalizations in abstracts from psycholinguistics perspective. The results show: (1) In 30 abstracts, the frequency of anaphoric reference is 24, the second type is lexical reiteration (15 times), but elaborated nominal group (9 times) and cause and effect networks (3 times) are seldom used in abstracts. (2) From the surface of language, it can be found that through using four cohesive patterns of nominalizations, links between sentences become tighter and the whole discourse become more coherent. (3) Moreover, from a psycholinguistics perspective, using cohesive patterns of nominalizations follows the principle of language economy, and it can lighten memory burden, more importantly, it can help readers
to understand the process of establishing cohesive relationships in writer’s mind, and how these relationships can be reflected in the surface of language.
Keywords: psycholinguistics; cohesive patterns; nominalization
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