A Study of Nominalization in Pharmaceutical Research Articles

Nominalization is the key resource in construing disciplinary academic registers. The present study analyzes nominalization in authentic pharmaceutical research articles based on studies about grammatical metaphor in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The analysis shows that nominalization abounds in these texts with "Transference from process to thing" as the most productive mechanism for forming nominalization. In terms of discourse functions, nominalizations play an important role in creating technical terms for discipline. The tri-stratal in-depth examination of one sample text reveals how nominalizations construe Taxonomies and Activity Sequences for two distinct field types-"the field of research" and "the field of object of study".These discourse findings have the potential of contextualizing SFL-informed genre analysis in the language classroom.