Misrepresenting New Information

Martin & Rose (2007: 107):

Nominalisations are a common form of grammatical metaphor. Reconstruing a process as a Thing has the twin advantage that i) Things can be classified and described with the rich resources of nominal group lexis, including many kinds of evaluation, and ii) the nominalised process and its qualities can be presented as the starting point or end point of the clause, as its Theme or New information.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, not all nominalisations are metaphorical; see, for example, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 286) on technical terms.

[2] To be clear, the "rich resources" of the grammatical unit nominal group, including 'evaluations', are grammatical. Lexis is specified by the most delicate features of lexicogrammatical systems.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. To be clear,

• information is not a system of the clause,
• any element of a clause can be highlighted as New information, not just the 'end point', 
• more than one element of a clause may be highlighted as New information, 
• there may no element of a clause highlighted as New information, and
• nominalisation is not a prerequisite for highlighting information as New.