A contrastive study of nominalization in the systemic functional framework

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of nominalization in Italian and Slovene within the framework of systemic functional grammar as described by M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues. Nominalization is viewed as a type of grammatical metaphor whereby processes which are congruently realized by verbs are metaphorically realized by nouns expressing the same process as those verbs. The frequency of nominalization varies greatly among languages as well as among genres within a language, and may cause problems when two languages interact, e.g. in translation, especially when one of the two languages seems less prone to use this kind of grammatical metaphor than the other. In the present study, an analysis is carried out of a 2.5 million-token parallel corpus of Italian source texts and their Slovene translations, particularly with regard to the different translation equivalents that may appear in the translated texts, which is partly dependent of the type of process involved.