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Nominalization, Incongruent
Nominalization, Incongruent
positions, some of which we might well celebrate and others not. The lesson I
take from his article is that we need to take great care in interpreting the role
played by nominalization in discourse of various kinds, and to this I would add
the need to carefully consider phylogenetic reasoning about why nominalization
evolved and how this semo-history relates to the ways it is used.
participants and causal relations between them). This incongruent relation for
Billig’s clause is outlined following.
Billig does not deal with interpersonal metaphors of mood and modality
such as those just exemplified, which accordingly will not detain us here. But it
is important from a linguistic perspective to see nominalization as one aspect of
a larger phenomenon. SFL’s general theory of grammatical metaphor is outlined
in Halliday and Matthiessen (1999, 2004). Halliday (1998; reprinted in Halliday,
2004) focuses in more detail on ideational metaphor; Zhu (2008) provides a very
accessible introduction to this work. Martin (1992a) and Martin and Rose (2003)
present a discourse semantic perspective; Martin (1995) focuses in more detail
on interpersonal metaphor in a hortatory exposition. Simon-Vandenbergen et al.
(2003) collect together a number of important SFL studies, including work on its
ontogenesis. It would appear that the understanding of nominalization typically
deployed in critical linguistics, and later CDA, predate its recontextualization
as part of a more general theory of grammatical metaphor in SFL. Martin (2000)
offers a more contemporary discussion of the roles this and other dimensions of
SFL might play in CDA research. Billig draws very selectively on this research
tradition, mainly by way of reinforcing the treatment of nominalization as a
kind of language pathology in CDA; this opportunistic reading radically distorts
the interpretation of the social function of grammatical metaphor in most SFL
research.
At the other end of all but one of these clauses Billig concentrates on his news,
namely, the negative evaluation he is developing of critical writers’ argument
(bold below). The bad news involves either negative processes (e.g. distorts) or
attributes (e.g. a self-referential paradox):
Critical writers have argued that nominalization conceals and distorts.
Their argument is made through the use of nominalization.
Because it uses forms that are said to distort,
the argument must itself be distorted.
Thus, the critical argument either destroys itself –
or (the argument) reduces itself to a self-referential paradox.
Either way, it is seriously compromised.
These negative evaluations highlight another important function of
nominalization – that of affording opportunities for evaluation (Martin and
White, 2005). As foreshadowed in Trew (1979), resources for both positive and
negative evaluation in language key heavily on nominals (cf. Trew’s rioting blacks,
African demonstrators, thirteen unarmed Africans, Zimbabweans); and without
nominalization, there would be no affected participant for long-term critics of
CDA to pounce upon:
Long-term opponents of critical discourse analysis might pounce gleefully upon the
preceding analyses.
awaits cultures of this kind in the face of environmental challenges or, more
disastrously, the arrival of invaders with the technology and bureaucracy, both
secular and religious, that grammatical metaphor affords.
Should I really have felt called upon to generate this reply? What have I learned
(a little more about differences between knowledge structures perhaps)? What
has been learned from me (severe space constraints, as ever in replies, have not
served my explanations well I fear)? I am left concerned about critique, and
warring words in warring worlds. Should we live another dream?
N OTE S
1. Note of course that nominalize is itself a derivation, of a verb from a noun – but not
one that creates stratal tension since nominalize is a verb realizing a process here.
2. Doyle, A.C. (1981) ‘The Valley of Fear. Part 1 The Tragedy of Birlstone’, The Penguin
Complete Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1: The Warning. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
3. Technicality regularly involves turning ideationally metaphorical nominalizations
into abstract concepts in a given field, thereby killing off the stratal tension that made
the concept thinkable (e.g. condensation, evaporation, transpiration in science); this
lightens the discourse-processing demands of a technical discipline, in effect making
room for more stratal tension. Both Billig, and the CDA analysts he is critiquing, use
the term nominalization as both a live and dead metaphor, and it is in fact a feature
of this kind of vertical discourse that we cannot always be quite sure when they are
using it one way rather than the other (cf. Martin, 1993a, 1993b, 2007a, 2007b for
discussion).
4. The Theme is ellipsed in this clause, but sustains Billig’s orientation to his field.
5. This obscurely published paper is available from the author on request; the paper itself
makes clear the reasons why it is so difficult to access.
6. Ignoring Trew is fairly typical for critics of CDA, almost pathological one might say;
I have even witnessed one of his examples taken out of context and offered as an
example of the way CDA fails to take co-text and context into account, without any
citation of Trew’s own treatment whatsoever.
7. Consider, for example, my humanities-style allusion in the heading for this section to
A.M. Smith’s Ladies Detective Agency series, specifically Morality for Beautiful Girls
(New York: Anchor Books, 2002), or those in the title of the article to James Brown
and to Michelle Lazar (in Discourse & Society 15: 2–3); Fuller (1998) describes Stephen
Jay Gould’s techniques for bridging these divides.
8. For my thoughts on this irrealis dimensions of ‘critical’ inquiry, see Martin (2004,
2007c).
REFERENCES
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London: Taylor and Francis.
Christie, F. and Martin, J.R. (eds) (2007) Knowledge Structure: Functional Linguistic and
Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum.
Coffin, C. (2006) Historical Discourse: The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation. London:
Continuum.
Doyle, A.C. (1981) ‘The Valley of Fear’, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, pp.
769–868. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freebody, P., Maton, K. and Martin, J.R. (2008) ‘Talk, Text and Knowledge: Literacy
and Cumulative Learning in Schools’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
31: 188–201.
Martin: Incongruent and proud 809
Martin, J.R. and Wodak, R. (eds) (2003). Re/Reading the Past: Critical and Functional
Perspectives on Discourses of History. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
O’Halloran, K. (2006) Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images.
London: Continuum.
Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M., Taverniers, M. and Ravelli, L.J. (eds) (2003) Metaphor:
Systemic and Functional Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Trew, T. (1979) ‘“What the Papers Say”: Linguistic Variation and Ideological Difference’, in
R. Fowler, B. Hodge, G. Kress and T. Trew (eds) Language and Control. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Wignell, P. (2007) On the Discourse of Social Science. Darwin, Australia: Charles Darwin
University Press.
Zhu, Yongsheng (2008) ‘Nominalisation, Verbalisation and Grammatical Metaphor’, in
J. Webster (ed.) Meaning in Context: Strategies for Implementing Intelligent Applications
of Language Studies, pp. 297–308. London: Continuum.