Study Of Nominalization In Linguistics Papers By Chinese EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

The English language has great manifestation of power in modern internationalcommunication and academic exchanges. For academic or graduation papers writtenin English, the use of language can to a certain extent influence their overall quality.Abstracts, as the very first part before the body content, directly affect the papers’attractiveness to potential readers.Abstracts should be concise, objective and authoritative, which is precisely whatnominalization can function to serve. Nominalization, usually defined as a process inwhich verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech or other constructions function toserve as nominals in clauses, is a phenomenon commonly seen in many languages. Itcan fulfill the functions of realizing objectivity, conciseness, formality and cohesion.The application of nominalization has proven to be a significant factor in determiningthe quality of language use, and in return the quality of the overall paper written.Studying the situation of nominalization used by Chinese advanced EFL learners bycomparing with that of native English speakers is of certain practical value. It canhelp to find the differences in using this phenomenon between them and possibleareas to improve for both Chinese English learners and English teachers.The working framework in this thesis is based mainly upon Halliday’s ideas offunctional linguistics, also referencing Quirk and Biber’s efforts in grammar research.Nominalization is classified at two basic levels: the lexical one with suffixation, zeroderivation and–ing gerunds as its subtypes, and the clausal one further divided intoto-infinitive clauses, that-clauses and wh-clauses. This thesis builds two corpora bycollecting200pieces of abstracts of100Chinese postgraduate students of linguisticsand100native linguistics postgraduates. Tagging, concordance and statisticaltechniques are then utilized to make identifications of the specific instances and tomake calculations of the data obtained. This paper aims to find and compare thetrends, specific uses and differences in nominalization application between these twogroups of speakers.It is found that there is no statistically significant difference in the general use of lexical nominalizations between the two groups. In its subtypes, a significantdifference is found only in the use of zero derivational nominalizations. However,there exist significant differences in the use of most clausal nominalization types. Nosignificant difference is found only in the use of that-clauses. In all, Chinese advancedEFL learners have a certain level of awareness of grammatical metaphor but they mayfail to reach a satisfactory level, or may have a certain underuse tendency ofnominalization application both in frequency and types (especially at the clausal level)compared to the native English speakers.It is thus suggested that college English teaching in China should attach moreimportance to the teaching of grammatical metaphor and types of nominalization,clausal nominalization in particular, thus improving the quality of academic papersand boosting international academic exchanges.