Experiential values of grammatical features (grammatical transformation) According to Fairclough (2001), when one wishes to represent some real or imaginary

action, event, state of affairs or relationship textually, there is often a choice between different grammatical process and participant types and such selection can be ideologically significant. This is because “linguistic codes do not reflect reality neutrally; they interpret, organize and classify the subjects of discourse. They embody theories of how the world is arranged; worldviews or ideologies” (Fowler 1986, 27). The choice of an iconic SVO sentence is significant in delineating agents, processes and patients. In an SV sentence, we have an event with a focus on the action rather than on the participants in the action. An SVC sentence has attributions. The choice of either one of these sentence types may show what a speaker really wants readers to know or not to know. In essence, there may be a

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huge difference, for instance, in interpretation, meaning and even emotional reaction to these sentences:

 Major Nzegwu has killed Sardauna (SVO)

 Sardauna has died. (SV)

 Sardauna is dead. (SVC)

The first sentence clearly reveals, in iconic terms, the doer of the action, the action itself and the victim. The second sentence shows only the victim as subject while using an intransitive verb. The third sentence has a subject and treats the overall information as a given event. There are other choices like the passives and the use of ergative pairs that may also reveal choices that may not be neutral. Similarly, in the two sentences below, the first sentence has no agency but the patient is foregrounded. The second sentence has the same structure as the first but there is a ‘circumstance’ which is implicated. The circumstance further mystifies agency and make the whole issue be as if it were happening in a chaos.

 Sardauna was killed (a passive with undeclared agency)

 Sardauna was killed in a crossfire (a passive with an undeclared agency but with a circumstance)

There is also a difference (for instance) between ‘Bombs explode in Gaza’ and ‘Israel Bombs Gaza’. In the former there is an ergative pair, ‘bombs’ are only a medium and they cannot act on their own without human agency. So using the medium here may help in hiding the actual agent. Simpson (1993, 107) gives a particular illustration of what he considers “an astonishing act of linguistic dissimulation” in this sentence:

The boy died when the policeman’s gun went off.

There is a deliberate obfuscation of causality here, especially as agency is mystified. The boy is shown as dying by himself while the gun is shown as exploding by itself. The connection is most certainly not discernible here or is clearly remote. He sees such obfuscation as having underlying political motive that may be biased in favour of certain political institution. One other issue here is the handicap to challenge such issues on the basis of truth as this arguably is still a true representation of circumstances. This can only

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be challenged on the basis of a conscious suppression of a reasonable version of reality (Simpson, 1993).

Generally, the resort to use a particular grammatical structure may depend largely upon the version of reality a speaker is projecting to their audience. Selection of particular sentences types builds up a model of reality that simply serves the ideological interests and perceptions of a speaker. The grammatical system has facility that allows a speaker to choose and that facility, ipso facto, creates subjectivity as well. This issue will be discussed further with the grammatical metaphor (in terms of nominalizations) where representation is much more complex and frozen.

According to Toolan (2001), a nominalization is a transformation of a clausal process into a noun phrase, thus treating the entire process as an established “thing”, which can then serve as a participant in another more inspectable process. It essentially freezes a clausal process. Similarly, Downing and Locke (2006) see it as a grammatical metaphor that distances us from events, raising the representation of a situation from the iconic to a high level of abstraction. Nominalization analysis is handy in ideological analysis for it provides a process by which one can utter a statement without an iconic detailing of events and the responsibility to do so. As nominalization is a common grammatical feature in writing, it is only relevant in ideological analysis when it is used in the service of power or where essential clarification of details is important. The late Murtala Muhammad, in explaining why they took over power from Gowon, gave three reasons which are all forms of nominalization ‘lack of consultation’, ‘indecision’, ‘indiscipline and neglect’. These issues are all put into such summative lexicon that affords one the room to charge against another without necessarily giving details. This can also be compared to when one gives accounts of a positive thing done by themselves which they prefer to give in clear iconic terms in order to take credit.

Downing and Locke (2006, 163-164) outline that a nominalization can be realized in various forms, namely:

Process realised as entity just as in:

 His conception of the drama has a very modern ring. (nominalized)

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 He conceives of the drama in a way that sounds very modern to us.

Attribute realised as entity:

 The usefulness of this machinery is dwindling. (nominalized)

 This machinery is becoming less useful.

Circumstance into entity as in ‘last decade’

 The last decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in technology. (nominalized)

 During the last decade agricultural technology has increased as never before.

Dependent situation realized as entity:

A whole state of affairs, which in its congruent form would be realised as a subordinate clause, can be visualised as an entity and expressed by a nominal:

 Fears of disruption to oil supplies from the Gulf helped push crude oil prices up dramatically. (nominalized)

 Because people feared that oil would not be supplied as usual from the Gulf, the prices of crude oil rose dramatically.

These changes into nominalized forms obfuscate issues and stint on details. Fowler and Kress (1979) argue that apart from the disappearance of modality and tense in nominalization, the change also helps in objectifying a process. The change, moreover, also helps in the process of lexicalization as the nominalizations become objects of modification thus yielding (or generating) other lexicon like modifiers and becoming established. This lexical density created by nominalizations, according to Eggins (2004, 96), allows us to be able to “count, specify, classify and qualify” nominals. Take as an example “the soviet threat” cited by Fairclough (2001). This is a nominalization which has a modifier ‘soviet’

and an article ‘the’ (which also doubles as a presupposition). This phrase, due to its lexical density, has a capacity for believability and rootedness Lexicalization, thus, fixes the object-as-process into a single habitualized entity. Eggins (2004,95) also argues that apart from lexical density, nominalizations also make us create logical relations in the abstract by organizing “our text not in terms of ourselves, but in terms of ideas, reasons, causes etc.” This use reifies objects and makes them acquire certain responsibility and agency. We can therefore safely conclude that nominalization helps in objectification, mystification,

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abstraction and reification. In my data analysis, we will see how such reification assists in the service of ideology and power.