Aspects of Nominalization from a Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

In his book Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition, O’Halloran (2003) concentrates on the application of certain key concepts in critical discourse analysis (CDA) from the point of view of reader cognition and text interpretation. One of the central points of this book is the discussion on the potential shortcomings of CDA with regard to text cognition. The analytical apparatus of CDA has also been influenced by certain concepts developed in systemic functional linguistics (Fowler et al. 1979, Hodge and Kress 1993), which means that O’Halloran’s remarks on reader cognition also comment on the systemic functional concepts that are commonly used as analytical tools in CDA, such as those of transitivity and nominalization (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). He argues that the explanation for these concepts in systemic functional linguistics is based on assumptions about reader cognition that are mostly implicit rather than explicit (O’Halloran 2003: 2). According to O’Halloran (2003: 21) this means that CDA, while effective in the description stage of analysis (i.e. in highlighting text bias), is less strong in the interpretation stage of analysis which focuses on reader cognition, in other words on the discourse of the reader, rather than on the text (O’Halloran 2003: 21).