From Process, Epithet to Thingness: Nominalisation in English and Chinese

Nominalisation is a linguistic phenomenon which is related with language in use and language user.Therefore, it has a mixed feature of grammar and semantics.Informed by the Systemic Functional Linguistics, this article analyses the changing course of verbs and adjectives into nouns, and explores how processes and epithets are turned to have their nature of Thingness.A comparison is made between Chinese and English nominalisations.It is believed that an analysis of the similarities and differences in these two languages is helpful to the Chinese-English translation.