Nominalizations in scientific and political genres: A systemic functional linguistics perspective.

Halliday (1985, 1994) contemplates that there are two kinds of utterances: congruent, also called non-metaphorical; and incongruent, or metaphorical. Predominantly, it is believed that people, places and things are realized by means of a noun; actions are realized verbally and so on. However, all meanings may have more than one way of realization, and sometimes, in written language and particularly in scientific register, the realizations of the semantic functions of the clause are not typical, but marked. The general characterization of GM in terms of alternative realizations is stated more precisely as alternative lexico-grammatical realizations of a choice in the semantics (Simon-Vandenbergen, Taverniers, & Ravelli, 2003).Read less