Dependent situation as entity
A whole state of affairs, which in its congruent form would be realized as a subordinate clause, can be visualized as an entity and expressed by a nominal:
Fears of disruption to oil supplies Because people feared that oil would not
from the Gulf helped push crude oil be supplied as usual from the Gulf, the
prices up dramatically. price of crude oil rose dramatically.
We can observe that, in many cases of nominalization, normal human Agents and Experiencers are absent, replaced by abstractions that are in some way related to them (‘fears’, ‘laughter’) and may be more emotionally charged. In other cases, those where a temporal entity ‘witnesses’ the event, the human Agent may not be recoverable at all, as in b and c above.
These few examples may serve to show that in English grammatical metaphor is a powerful option in the presenting of information. It reconceptualizes an event as a participant, with the consequent restructuring of the rest of the clause, which influences the way the information is perceived. It presents a different cognitive mapping from that of the ‘congruent’ or iconic correspondence between syntax and semantics that is found in basic English. In institutionalized settings, the concept of grammatical metaphor goes a long way towards explaining professional jargons such as journalese and officialese as written forms. Others, such as the language of business management, use nominalization in spoken as well as written English.
