Critical Analysis of Grammatical Metaphor of Nominalization in English and Persian Political Discourses

Nominalization is one of the metaphors introduced by Halliday, which is a part of ideational meta-function. The present research study is an attempt to investigate the role of nominalization in political Persian and English discourses from Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective. In so doing, it attempts to answer the following research questions: (1) Does nominalizations have any role in cohesion and coherence as well as in marginalization and highlighting in the text? (2) What’s ideological role of nominalization in Persian and English political discourse? (3) In which discourse (Persian or English) more nominalizations are used? By studying 22/5 pages of English newspapers (Guardian, USA Today, Telegraph and New York Times) and 22/5 pages of Persian newspapers (Keyhan, Qods and Shargh) focused principally on Iran’s nuclear program negotiations, it was discovered that nominalization can cause marginalization and highlighting by changing information construction of the sentence (theme and rheme), referring to presuppositions, using entailment, omitting the agent and changing the mental models. Nominalization helps the author to make reference to the background knowledge of the reader without giving any repetitive information (coherence). It also helps the writer to use nouns (next to each other) which have the same conceptual meaning (cohesion). Furthermore, it can be concluded that this metaphor is used more frequently in Persian newspapers than in English ones.