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CHAPTER 2
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter presents the review of related literature
and studies relevant in the nominalization of verbs. The
concepts derived from these readings give further insights
into the topic under consideration.
Chomskys Remarks on Nominalization
In his 1970 paper Remarks on Nominalization, Noam
Chomsky (1970) provided several arguments for the lexical
hypothesis, namely the idea that nouns like refusal,
rejection, growth, and so on are nouns throughout the
entire syntactic derivation (Chomsky, 1970).
In Chomskys view, a person who has learned a language
has acquired a system of rules that relate sound and
meaning in a certain specific way. He has, in other words,
acquired a certain competence that he puts to use in
producing and understanding speech (Chomsky, 1970). Since
the central task of descriptive linguistics is to construct
grammars of specific languages, language-learning then is
the process of selecting a grammar of the appropriate form
that relates sound and meaning (Chomsky, 1970).
Grammar is a tightly organized system. If we modify
one part, it generally involves widespread modification of
other facets. It follows, then, that enrichment of one
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component of the grammar will permit simplification in
other parts. Thus certain descriptive problems can be
handled by enriching the lexicon and simplifying the
categorical component of the base, or conversely; or by
simplifying the base at the cost of greater complexity of
transformations, or conversely (Chomsky, 1970).
However, the proper balance between various components
of the grammar is entirely an empirical issue. There are no
general considerations that settle this matter but rather,
the evaluation procedure must itself be selected on
empirical grounds to get the correct answer. It would be
pure dogmatism to maintain, without empirical evidence,
that the categorical component, or the lexicon, or the
transformational component must be narrowly constrained by
universal conditions, the variety and complexity of
language being attributed to the other components (Chomsky,
1970).
It is in this regard that Chomskys lexicalist
hypothesis on nominalization arose. According to a paper by
Frederick J. Newmeyer (2011) on Chomsky (1970), Chomsky
argued that an important class of nominalizations what he
called derived nominals were listed in the lexicon as
such; that is, they did not occur underlyingly in full
sentences, nor were they derived transformationally from
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verbs (Newmeyer, 2011). He also enumerated, based on
Chomskys (1970) paper, three types of nominalization in
English. First, he called attention to gerundive nominals,
as in (1):
(1) a. Johns riding his bicycle rapidly (surprised me).b. Marys not being eager to please (was
unexpected).
c. Sues having solved the problem (made life easy
for us).
Second, he pointed to derived nominals, as in (2):
(2) a. Johns decision to leave (surprised me).b. Marys eagerness to please (was unexpected).
c. Sues help (was much appreciated).
And he referred to an intermediate class, as in (3),
all of whose members have the suffix ing like gerundive
nominals:
(3) a. Johns refusing of the offerb. Johns proving of the theorem
c. the growing of tomatoes
(Newmeyer, 2011).
Chomsky had no problem with the idea that gerundive
nominals are desentential, given that they exhibit all the
hallmarks of full sentences. His lexicalist hypothesis,
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however, posited that derived nominals (DN) are dimply
listed as nouns in the lexicon (Newmeyer, 2011).
Furthermore, Newmayer states, Chomsky gave three
arguments for lexicalist hypothesis. He calls the first one
the Idiosyncrasy Argument (Newmeyer, 2011). It was well
accepted that a transformational rule should capture a
regular productive relationship, but the relationship
between DNs and their corresponding verbs is highly
irregular, because, for one thing, not every DN has a
corresponding verb (Chomsky, 1970). In those cases in which
no verb corresponding to a DN exists, a transformational
account would have to invent an abstract verb whose only
function would be to undergo the nominalization
transformation, e.g. do to deed. Chomsky further argued
that lexicalist treatment of DNs could allow their
irregularity to be captured in a natural manner (Newmeyer,
2011).
Chomskys second argument for the lexicalist
hypothesis was dubbed by Newmeyer as the Internal
Structure Argument (Newmeyer, 2011). Its point of
departure is that fact that the structures in which DNs
occur resemble noun phrases in every way. They can contain
determiners, pronominal adjectives, and prepositional
phrase complements, but not adverbs, negation, aspect, nor
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tense (Newmeyer, 2011). Such facts follow automatically if
DNs are nouns in the lexicon and are inserted as such; that
is, a lexicalist treatment predicts them to have the same
distribution as ordinary nouns (Newmeyer, 2011).
Chomskys third argument, the Frozen Structure
Argument, was more complex. The problem in need of
explanation is that DNs occur in noun phrase corresponding
to base structures, but not to transformationally derived
structures (Chomsky, 1970).
Based on his findings, Chomsky concludes that the
transformational hypothesis is correct for the gerundive
nominals and the lexical hypothesis for the lexical
hypothesis for the derived nominals and perhaps, though
much less clearly so, for the mixed forms (Chomsky, 1970).
The Process of Nominalization
Conversion is the formation of new words by converting
words of one class into another class, i.e. by turning
words of one part of speech to those of another part of
speech in traditional terms (www.jimyspa.com).
Nominalization is one such process. Quoting The Oxford
Companion to English Language (1992), Jezdinka (2008)
defines nominalization as the process or result of forming
a noun from a word belonging to another word class or the
process or result of deriving a noun phrase by a
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transformation from a finite clause (Jezdinka, 2008). To
put it simply, nominalization is the process of
transforming verbs, adjectives, or adverbs into nouns
(Cameron, 2011).
Two types of nominalization are found in English. One
type requires the addition of a derivational suffix to
create a noun. In other cases, English uses the same word
as noun without any additional morphology. This second
process is referred to as zero-derivation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalization).
In creating nominalizations with derivational
morphology, a grammatical expression is turned into a noun
phrase by use of affixes. For example, in the sentence
Combine the two chemicals, combine acts as a verb. This
can be turned into a noun via the addition of the suffix
-ation, as in The experiment involved the combination of
the two chemicals. Additional examples of this is failure
(from fail), movement (from move) and reaction (from
react). An especially common case of verbs being used as
nouns is the addition of the suffix ing, known in English
as a gerund. Some examples are swimming (from swim),
running (from run), and editing (from edit)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalization).
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In nominalization using the process of zero-
derivation, verbs and sometimes adjectives in English can
be used directly as nouns without the addition of a
derivational suffix. Some examples include:
Change
I need a change. (noun) I will change. (verb)
Murder
The murderof the man was tragic. (noun) He will murderthe man. (verb)
In addition to true zero derivation, English also has
a number of words which, depending on subtle changes in
pronunciation, are either nouns or verbs. One such type is
the change in stress placement, as in the case of REcord
(noun) and
reCORD(verb)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalization).
Moultman (2006) refers to nominalization as the
linguistic process that turns expressions of various
categories into nouns (Moultman, 2006). He enumerated four
views, or four types of nominalization:
1.Nominalizations that refer to an argument of the baseexpression. Some cases of this kind are agent and
result nominalizations, as well as event
nominalizations.
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2.Nominalizations that refer to reifications ofmeanings. These are supposed to act as singular terms
referring to the meaning of the adjectives from which
they are derived, i.e. the properties such adjectives
express.
3.Nominalizations that introduce new objects. Theserefer to objects whose nature is entirely given by the
meaning of the base expression without being identical
to that meaning.
4.Nominalizations that do not refer at all. In thisview, there are no actual objects nominalizations of
the relevant sort stand for.
There are several reasons for nominalization. One is
that it makes texts impersonal and authoritative. By
turning actions into nouns we make the texts sound less
personal and more authoritative. Another is to add
informationnominalization is particularly useful because
we can do several things to add information to nouns. The
last is to avoid repetition. We can use nominalization to
avoid repetition when we want to refer back to a previously
mentioned idea; i.e. nominalization can paraphrase what has
been said
(www.slideshare.net/pietvanderlaan/nominalization).
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Deverbal Nouns
There are three kinds of nominalizations: deverbal
(verbs to nouns), de-adjective (adjectives to nouns) and
miscellaneous others (www.jimmyspa.com). For the purpose of
discussion in this paper, we will concentrate on deverbals,
or the nominalization of verbs.
In grammar, deverbal nouns are nouns derived from
verbs or verb phrases. Deverbals may be categorized
semantically according to what facet of the process is
construed as a thing
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deverbal_noun). Deverbal
nouns are extremely common in written and spoken English
(Crouch, De Paiva, Gurevich and King, 2006).
Despite the frequency of deverbal nouns, most lexical
resources currently available do not provide systematic
correspondences between deverbals and verbs (Crouch, et.al,
2006). Citing Roeper (2005), Monika Rathert and Artemis
Alexiadou (2010) even assert that deverbal nouns have been
important and controversial in linguistic research, as they
constitute an instance of structures showing categorically
ambivalent behavior (Rathert and Alexiadou, 2010).
As is often the case with derived words, some
deverbals are highly lexicalized and no longer retain a
connection to the original verb (Crouch, et.al, 2006).
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Also, according to Crouch, et.al. (2006), the
linguistic literature distinguishes two types of nominals:
so-called process nominals and result nominals. Process
nominals imply that the event has taken place, and the
nominal refers to the action. Result nominals, by contrast,
refer to the goal or result of the process. Thus, result
nominals are less action-like (Crouch, et.al, 2006).
On the other hand, Andersen (2000) postulates that
deverbal nouns are hybrid forms between the categories noun
and verb. This means more specifically that they share
some characteristics typical of verbs and some
characteristics typical of nouns (Andersen, 2000).
Although nouns and verbs are semantically related, the
issue of whether nouns, like verbs, license argument
structure has provoked a great deal of controversy
(Alexiadou, 2001). For instance, according to Andersen
(2000), typical nouns have specific reference as opposed to
typical verbs, which do not refer at all. Typical nouns
denote countable entities or objects and are easily
pluralized as opposed to verbs (Andersen, 2000). However,
in recent years, there is a certain amount of consensus
that nouns do not behave uniformly with respect to the
licensing of argument structure. Some nouns are
systematically like verbs in their argument-taking
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capacities, while others are quite different and in fact
take no arguments at all (Alexiadou, 2001). Specifically,
Grimshaw (1990) in Alexiadou (2001) claims that nouns
denoting complex events, like verbs, also have an argument
structure, since they denote events breaking into aspectual
subparts. On the other hand, nouns that denote simple
events do not have an argument structure (Alexiadou, 2011).
In this regard, deverbals are a hybrid of the
properties of nouns and verbs. Deverbal nouns have
reference, but they tend to have generic reference rather
than specific, which means they often lack determiners,
plural markers, and have argument structure (Andersen,
2000). The ability to refer is a typical nominal property,
the most typical way being the anaphoric reference where an
antecedent is involveda characteristic also shared by
deverbal nouns (Andersen, 2000).
So, all in all, Andersen (2000) concludes, deverbal
nouns share characteristics of both nouns and verbs
(Andersen, 2000). The most productive morphological types
are the ones which are closest to the verb. The process
nominals are closer to the verb than the result nominals.
Arguments against Nominalization
As mentioned before, nominalizations make your texts
impersonal and authoritative. Hence, it is widely used in
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the academic circles, by lawyers, bureaucrats and business
writers. Nominalization, they think, makes them sound
intellectual and deep, and so they tend to use it a lot.
However, some writers beg to differ. Some of them
think that overuse of nominalizations can actually do more
harm than good.
According to Helen Swords New York Times Article
Zombie Nouns (July 23, 2012), she calls nominalized words
as zombie nouns because they cannibalize active verbs,
suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract
entities for human beings (Sword, 2012). She adds that
zombie nouns are at their worst when they gather in
jargon-generating packs and infect every noun, verb, and
adjective in sight (Sword, 2012). They also impede clear
communication, and send the students a dangerous message
that people who use big words are smarter or at least
appear to be than those who dont (Sword, 2012). All in
all, Sword concludes, a paragraph heavily populated by
nominalizations will send the readers straight to sleep
(Sword, 2012).
Brady Spangenbergs article in The Grammar Gang Blog
(http://thegrammargang.blogspot.com) on avoiding
nominalizations (April 4, 2009) points out to
nominalization as one major cause of clunkiness that
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is, it seems as if the writer goes through the series of
wordy gymnastics and still doesnt get his or her point
across (Spangenberg, 2009). Nominalizations make4
sentences feature many more prepositions, helping verbs,
and passive constructions, all of which tend to slow down
your sentences and confuse your readers (Spangenberg,
2009).
Jocelyn Sykoras article on nominalizations
(http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/student_acad/ctl/tutors/resou
rces/writing_pamphlets/nominalizations.shtml) asserts that,
while nominalizations are useful in some cases, problems
arise when nominalizations and weak verbs begin to form
patterns. These patterns result in clunky and unclear
sentences (Sykora, 2010).
According to Bridget McKenna (2010) in her online
article Words that Move (and Words that Dont)
(http://www.hypnosis101.com/wordpress/nlp/hypnotic-
language/nominalizations/), nominalizations have a way of
limiting us in our thinking. It is because once we have
defined something, we can sometimes find it difficult to
re-define it. She cites as example love: as a noun it has
the attributes of a thing, while as a process it now has
duration and is subject to change (McKenna, 2010). In
short, nominalization is freezing a process.
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Dr. Kip Wheelers(2012) article calls nominalization a
type of wordiness (Wheeler, 2012). He begins by saying
beginning writers have trouble developing sufficient
length, while more advanced writers have trouble being
concise. As young writers become more comfortable writing,
they often develop bad habits such as what he calls
grammatical nominalization, referring to a type of
wordiness in which both a noun and a verb is used when a
verb alone is enough. Nominalization may also involve
phrases like there is or there are to begin sentences,
or excessive use of to-be verbs, making the sentence weak
(Wheeler, 2012).
Joe Cheals(2008) article also states that the
conscious mind likes to work with things they are more
solid, graspable and fixed. Nominalizations, according to
Cheal, are the conscious minds attempt at stopping the
world to have a look at it, to work with it and perhaps to
feel a sense of control (Cheal, 2008). While nominalization
is a useful thing, at other times it can be unhelpful and
confusing, and one of its confusing aspects is that they
are likely to have a wide degree of meanings. Thus, Cheal
enumerates the following cons in the use of nominalizations
(Cheal, 2008):
Misunderstanding due to vagueness
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Collective term and therefore lacks specificity Creates an inaccurate representation of the world Creates a stuckness if treated as real Can create polarity tensions, dilemmas and paradox.
The book Hot Text: Web Writing that Works (2010:209)
state that continuous transforming of actions into things
gets prose clotted. Readers struggle to figure out who does
what, because the prose seems full of objects with only a
few fuzzy actions.
Nick Daws in his article dated May 31, 2010
(http://www.mywritingblog.com/2010/05/nominalization-and-
why-you-should.html) one common characteristic of
nominalization is that it makes a term more verbose. While
it is not ungrammatical, high levels of nominalization can
make any book or article sound flat and dull (Daws, 2010).
All in all, these arguments against the use of
nominalizations agree over one thing: that use of
nominalization makes a work wordy and vague.
Arguments for Nominalization
Though some writers advise against nominalization,
there are some instances that nominalization can be useful,
especially in presentation of facts.
An article by David Crystal dated August 27, 2008 in
his blog (http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-
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nominalisations.html) quotes a correspondent to be saying
that there seems to be instances where nominalizations are
useful, particularly in academic writing (Crystal, 2008).
In fact, he says, nominalization has been present in
English since the beginning. What was actually being asked
to avoid are the overuse of two processes: (a) long words
formed with a suffix and (b) sentences where a noun phrase
derives from a finite clause (Crystal, 2008). But overuse
is not the same as use, Crystal argues, and no one can
avoid using nominalizations. Nominalization allows us the
option of being more abstract and impersonal (Crystal,
2008).
According to Barsalou, et.al. (2010) nominalizing a
process may license a variety of (mistaken) assumptions
about it: (1) a simple, well-defined representation
suffices to capture the processs content; (2) the process
is relatively stable across time and contexts; (3) the
process is easy to manipulate and influence; and (4) the
process enters into relatively simple causal relationships
(Barsalou, et.al, 2010). Although nominalizing a process
distorts it, advantages may result as well, warranting the
simplification. Nominalized processes may be relatively
easy to learn, store, and retrieve; they may be relatively
easy to communicate; they may be well suited to various
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types of reasoning. Because nominalized representations are
relatively simple, compact, and stable, they are efficient
cognitive units (Barsalou, et.al, 2010).
While Jose Carillo (http://josecarillo.blogspot.com)
agrees that nominalization sometimes causes such nouns as
those ending in ion make English so dense its sheer
torture to read, he concedes that nominalization isnt
always bad for the health of English prose (Carillo,
2011). In fact, he enlists five semantic situations where
nominalizations can actually prove useful:
1.Nominalization to make abstract things more concreteand credible. This is actually what many academics and
bureaucrats do to their prosebut to great excess. If
done sparingly and with restraint, however, this form
of nominalization can actually make abstract
statements more convincing.
2.Nominalization as a transitional device. By serving asa subject referring to an idea in a previous sentence,
a nominalization can provide smooth transition.
3.Nominalization to attenuate extremely harsh orforceful statements. In making extremely sensitive
statements, it is often prudent to use a
nominalization instead of its more direct and vigorous
verb form.
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4.Nominalization to more clearly identify the object ofits verb-form. For stronger emphasis, it is sometimes
desirable to use a nominalization to clearly identify
the object of the verb in the sentence.
5.Nominalization to replace awkward the fact thatphrases. When making a transition to the next
sentence, the easy but lazy way is to use the phrase
the fact that Nominalization of that phrase results
in a better sounding sentence and a more elegant
transition. (Carillo, 2011)
Carillo then concludes that since nominalization isnt
all that bad for the prose, there should be no hesitation
in using it when it is called for (Carillo, 2011).
Although Joe Cheal, as mentioned earlier in this
paper, stated some disadvantages of nominalization, he also
listed some advantages in using it. According to him, it
appears that part of the human condition is the need to
nominalize, to capture processes, and convert them into
things (Cheal, 2008). The following are the reasons why
nominalization is also important:
Convenient way to capture and label a process,thereby giving the conscious mind a grasp of reality
by providing points of reference.
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It is an umbrella term to cover a range ofexperiences.
Creates a trans-derivational search which is usefulfor trance work and artful vagueness. (Cheal, 2008)
South Australias Department of Education and
Childrens Studies
(www.decd.sa.gov.au/eyreandwestern/.../Nominalisation_Power
point....) also noted some reasons in the use of
nominalizations. One is that it helps to achieve a higher
degree of abstraction and technicality. Another is that
nominalization is significant in constructing a distant and
abstract world that can be reflected on. Lastly,
nominalization is one of the language choices that enables
movement towards highly written texts
(www.decd.sa.gov.au/eyreandwestern/.../Nominalisation_Power
point....).
In conclusion, it is still safe to say that the use of
nominalizations has certain advantages in making prose
better and easier to understand, as long as it isnt
overused and abused.
Related Studies
Some related studies, mostly descriptive, have been
done on the topic of nominalization.
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A paper by Maria Lapata (2002) discusses the
disambiguation of nominalization. She notes that any
attempt to automatically interpret nominalizations needs to
take into account the following: (a) the selectional
constraints imposed by the nominalization compound head;
(b) the fact that the relation of the modifier and the head
noun can be ambiguous; and (c) the fact that these
constraints can be easily overridden by contextual or
pragmatic forms (Lapata, 2002). Moreover, the
interpretation of nominalizations poses a further challenge
for probabilistic approaches, since the argument relations
between a head and its modifier are not readily available
in the corpus (Lapata, 2002). Thus, treating the
interpretation task as a disambiguation problem, she re-
created the missing distributional evidence by exploiting
partial parsing, smoothing techniques, and contextual
information.
First, Lapata selected a random sample of 1, 277
tokens, which were manually inspected and found out to have
796 nominalizations. Out of these, 596 were used as
training data for finding the optimal parameters and the
remaining 200 as test data. These were given to two
graduate students who served as judges to decide whether
modifiers are subject or object of a given nominalized
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head. Given a page of guidelines but no training, they
were given the corpus sentence in which the nominalization
occurred together with the previous and following sentence.
Comparing the smoothing variants, they found out that verb-
argument pairs with low-frequency verbs introduce noise due
to the errors inherent in the partial parser. They then
proceeded to study the influence of context on the
interpretation task, and explored the contribution of
context alone and in combination with the different
smoothing variants. These were combined using Ripper
(Cohen, 1996), a system that induces classification rules
from a set of pre-classified examples. The experiments
revealed that data sparseness can be overcome by taking
advantage of smoothing methods and surface contextual
information (Lapata, 2002).
Friederike Moltmann (2006) in his paper argues that
there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a
quite different treatment. While standard views in the
semantics of nominalizations are that they map mere
meanings into objects, that they refer to their implicit
arguments, and that they introduce new objects, the fourth,
Moltmann says, introduce new objects, but only partially
characterize them (Moltmann, 2006). Such nominalizations
generally refer to events or tropes (properties). This
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fourth kind does not refer at all; rather, the process of
nominalization would go along with rules for forming true
or false sentences with the nominalization on the basis of
true or false sentences involving the relevant base
expression. Moltmann (2006) then proceeds to compare trope
(adjectival) and event (verbal) nominalizations, stating
the only way of connecting the semantics of event or trope
nominalizations to that of the base expressions is on the
basis of the notion of the truth maker (Moltmann, 2006).
He concludes that by incorporating truth makers into
semantic structure, there are possibilities of a
compositional analysis of sentences involving truth makers
(Moltmann, 2006), thereby making nominalizations easy to
connect.
Solveiga Suinskien (2010) discusses in her study
nominalization as a cohesive device in British newspaper
editorials. She notes that the main purpose of editorials
is to contribute to the molding of public opinion on
current affairs and as such, they ought to have an
argumentative structure; thus, they need linguistic means
to serve the factual evidence in as convincing way as
possible (Suinskien, 2010). Nominalization, as a text
cohesive device of newspaper language, is used for
embedding as much information into a few words as possible.
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To manipulate the reader, the central actions are often
expressed in nominal form thus omitting the actor and
leaving the reader in doubt (Suinskien, 2010).
Employing textual analysis, Suinskien collected
samples of editorials published from January 1, 2009 to
December 1, 2009, from different social stratification of
English newspapers: the up-market (aimed at the upper
middle-class readers), mid-market (aimed at lower middle-
class and skilled working-class readers), and down-market
(aimed at working class readers). The titles were first
randomly selected and then nominalizations used in the
corpus to be investigated were chosen.
The findings showed that since editorials are composed
under rather strict space constraints, nominalization
allows a notion which is verbal in origin to be inserted
into an idea unit like it is a noun (Suinskien, 2010).
Consequently, she adds, most nominalizations can be re-
written as a phrase or clause. Nominalizations also
depersonalize the agent. The nominalizing of verbs
disconnects the participant from the action that they
performed by condensing that transitive relationship from
the clause into a single, general noun (Suinskien, 2010).
In conclusion, Suinskien states that the high
frequency of nominalizations in editorials is due to lack
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of space or even may be of time. The style of writing
editorials needs a certain device for talking about
abstract ideas. The precise lexical choice is a measure of
information density (Suinskien, 2010).
In an attempt to convince the readers that
nominalization is a most powerful device in English, Gao
Wenyan (2012) made a comparative study in nominalization in
medical paperd. Gao first asserts that medical writings are
generally standardized in language and concentrated on
highly technical terms but can be difficult to understand
due to its many forms and complexity. He suggests that
nominalization plays a crucial role in building the logical
structure of medical English papers and improving its
formality.
For the study, Gao obtained 10 Discussion Sections of
medical papers, and employed an analysis involving 3 steps:
(1) identifying the frequency of nominalization; (2)
comparing the lexical density; and (3) analyzing thematic
progression which contributes to the textual cohesion. The
results of his study implied that there are two essential
directions. One is that the results could serve as a
starting point for courses on genre analysis of medical
papers with special emphasis on their grammatical metaphor
in the form of nominalization which enhances the features
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of scientific precision, conciseness and objectivity.
Second, an understanding of the functional role and textual
consequences of grammatical metaphor is essential for a
full understanding of the meaning of any text (Gao, 2012).
Janelle Cameron (2011) published a thesis on teaching
nominalization to secondary ELD teachers. She states that
nominalization can be a powerful skill for language
learning students to acquire as they attempt to comprehend
content area texts at the secondary level (Cameron, 2011).
A commonly held belief is that language learners only need
language instruction through the intermediate level and are
then ready for full participation in mainstream courses;
however, teachers and administrators are often unaware of
the linguistic demands of academic text and also the
language proficiency requirements of content area
classrooms (Cameron, 2011). Rather than being thrust into
mainstream classrooms once intermediate level proficiency
is obtained, English language learners require advanced
language instruction specific to the academic content they
study. Knowing the particular linguistic demands of a
content area at the secondary level sets up the first
pedagogical challenge, while knowing how to instruct those
linguistic demands poses the next challenge for teachers
(Cameron, 2011).
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Selecting a focus group of teachers and students,
Cameron demonstrated the relevance of nominalizations by
recording the number of nominalizations found in randomly
selected passages from the 7th and 8th grade mandated history
curriculum. The findings showed that 38% of the sentence
subjects in the selected text and 85% of all headings were
nominalizations, proving the significance of recognizing
and understanding nominalizations within the text. Thus,
quoting Schleppegrell (2004), Cameron argues that a lack of
understanding of these nominalizations limits students
comprehension of the entire text (Cameron, 2011), proving
its importance. Even more surprising was that, the teachers
themselves do not recognize nominalizations, nor know how
to teach them, thus the need to instruct them first on how
to instruct it to students (Cameron, 2011).
With these intitial findings, Cameron proceeds to
assess the teacher-participants, then conducted training
sessions on nominalizations. The implications became clear:
if correlation between student comprehension and use of
nominalization could be shown, many more teachers might be
interested enough in the concept to learn what
nominalization is and how to teach it (Cameron, 2011).
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Local Studies
While there are no studies on nominalization in
English conducted locally, there are several studies on
Filipino, particularly Tagalog, language, its
nominalization and structure as compared to English
conducted by foreign researchers. It is worth to note that
these studies are somehow connected to the topic at hand.
Daniel Kaufman (2008) in particular presented a study
on exclamatives and temporal nominalizations in
Austronesian, touching particularly on Tagalog. In his
paper, Kaufman examines two functions of nominalization,
exclamatives and temporal adjuncts, as they are attested
commonly throughout Austronesian languages (Kaufman, 2008).
The question of identifying nouns and verbs in
morphologically conservative Austronesian languages
naturally looms large in any discussion of nominalization.
In particular, Philippine verbs have been argued to possess
many nominal properties, which in turn has been argued to
be the result of older reanalysis of nominal categories
into verbal ones (Kaufman,2008). For example, in the
following sentences, (a) employs the patient voice which
corresponds with genitive case on the agent and nominative
case on the patient, while (b) employs the actor voice
(Kaufman, 2008):
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(a) S(in)unog ni Malaya ang bandila.Malaya burnt the flag. (lit. The flag was Malayas
burnt thing.)
(b) Nag-sunog si Malaya ng bandila.Malaya burnt a flag. (lit. Malaya was the burner of
the flag.)
Nominals, although by no means requiring
presuppositionality, have been argued to inherently possess
referential properties either by virtue of their lexical
category or due to their proto-typical functions in
discourse. Thus, Kaufman concludes, they are thus uniquely
suited for anaphoric functions. Following this line of
thought, it can now be explained why Philippine nominals
are interpreted specifically as when-clauses rather than
hypotheticals (i.e., if-clauses) or as indicating
simultaneous action (i.e. as-clauses) (Kaufman, 2008).
Matthias Gerner (2011) published a study on the
typology of nominalization in Asian languages. In
particular, he states that in Tagalog, action
nominalization is realized by partial prothetic
reduplication of the verbal stem. For example (Gerner,
2011):
mag-huli pag-huhuli
catch (to catch) catch (catching)
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In conclusion, Gerner states that an extended typology
will yield empirically testable hypotheses about the
connection between the nominalizations and other variables,
and that nominalizers also make way for new functions and
meanings.