Nominalization In The Writing Of Chinese Non-English Major Students

Nominalization is one of the most remarkable features of formal English style. English is a nominalizing language, different schools of linguistics have studied nominalization from their own perspectives. Famous linguist of functional grammar, Halliday (1994: 352) says, "In spoken language the ideational content is loosely strung out; in written language, the clausal patterns are typically rather simple; but the ideational content is densely packed in nominal constructions. And it is the written kind of complexity that involves grammatical metaphor." And he further points out that normalization is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor. Under the framework of functional grammar, the thesis firstly discusses definitions, types and patterns, different approaches to nominalization from home and abroad, discussion of different schools, nominalization and registers and basic functions of nominalization.The present thesis explores the question that the distribution and frequency of English nominalization in the compositions of Chinese non-English major learners. The hypothesis is that there is a positive correlation between the frequency of English nominalization in the compositions of Chinese non-English major learners and their English language proficiency. Based on this hypothesis, the present study investigates the following research questions: 1. What are the characteristics of nominalizations that used in students' compositions? 2. Whether learners become more sensitive to the rules of English nominalization as their English level increases? 3. What factors contribute to the phenomena for students in terms of nominalization production?To testify the hypothesis proposed by the study and answer these research questions, first of all, subjects are college non-English majors and English nominalizations are identified as lexical nominalization and clausal nominalization. Then two corpuses of non-English majors' final exam compositions from students of different levels in Xiamen University are established for further contrastive analysis. The concordance software adopted for analysis for this study is UltraEdit-32. Excel 2003 is used to make descriptive statistic of some general features of nominalization performance in the corpora. To learn the differences of lexical and clausal nominalization use between the two groups, a series of t tests are adopted in the study.The research shows that there is a positive correlation between the distribution frequency of nominalization in compositions of Chinese non-English major learners and their English language proficiency. Students of higher English proficiency level display a more freely and frequent nominalization production than those of lower English proficiency level. With regard to learners' nominalization production, lexical nominalizations outnumber clausal nominalizations, common words and expressions are far more than abstract words and expressions. Through contrastive analysis to the students' compositions and discussion to the research questions, the present study has some pedagogical significance to college English writing.