Nominalisation

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 729):

Nominalising is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. By this device, processes (congruently worded as verbs) and properties (congruently worded as adjectives) are reworded metaphorically as nouns; instead of functioning in the clause, as Process or Attribute, they function as Thing in the nominal group. Thus, for example:

is impaired by alcohol                                alcohol impairment

they allocate an extra packer                     the allocation of an extra packer

some shorter, some longer                         of varying length

they were able to reach the computer        their access to the computer

technology is getting better                        advances in technology

What then happens to the original ‘things’? They get displaced by the metaphoric ones, and so are reduced to modifying these: alcohol becomes a Classifier of impairment; the computer, one extra packer and technology go into prepositional phrases functioning as Qualifier to, respectively, access, allocation and advances.