| Nominalization, as a general and complicated feature of formal texts, is widely used in academic writings to simultaneously achieve word economy and information density. Papers in search of the acquisition of nominalization by Chinese English learners have reported that their use of it is always insufficient compared with native speakers. In order to improve Chinese English learners‘ proficiency in academic writing by means of nominalization, more must be known about the factors that affect their acquisition of nominalization. To date, however, seldom has the research explored possible reasons from the perspective of L1 transfer.The goals of this study are twofold: first, to detect the similarities and differences of the use of nominalization by the native speakers and nonnative speakers; second, to explore and explain the empirical evidence of L1 influence by means of both Jarvis‘ unified framework as well as the personal interview. The research questions to be addressed in this study are:1) What are the similarities and differences between Chinese postgraduates of English and their English counterparts in terms of the use of nominalization in abstracts of their theses?2) Does L1 transfer influence the use of English nominalization in the abstracts of the Chinese postgraduates‘ MA theses? If it does, how?30 abstracts of graduation theses majoring in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics from 2011 to 2015, comprising the Chinese learners‘ corpus, are collected from 5 different universities, which consist of two normal universities, two comprehensive universities and one university of foreign languages. Another collection of 15 abstracts from 2011 to 2015 of English native speakers‘ are also adopted as reference. In addition, the first language backgrounds of the native speakers‘ are strictly examined one by one to make sure they are native speakers. Drawing insights from the Systemic Functional Grammar, the instances of nominalization are firstly identified, then compared and at last discussed based on both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The analysis is firstly oriented to the statistical description of each subtype of nominalization used in the two corpora by means of Chi-Square Tests, and then to summarize the shared features exhibited by Chinese learners, and thirdly to compare these features of learners‘ IL with their L1, which are conducted to provide the empirical evidence of L1 transfer and to further explain the L1 influence. Furthermore, personal interviews are adopted to elicit students‘ attitudes toward nominalization and their inner thoughts when they begin to write a sentence.Data suggest that the abstracts of Chinese learners‘ are much longer than those of native speakers‘ and their use of lexical nominalization is nearly native-like, while they perform significantly different in using syntactic nominalization. Chinese learners are likely to overuse the V-ing gerund nominalization(P =.000), while they tend to underuse to-infinitive clause nominalization(P =.021), that-clause nominalization(P =.012) and wh-clause nominalization(P =.000) in their abstracts. Specifically, Chinese learners perform significant difference in using the structures of to-infinitive clause as subject(P =.001), and wh-clause as both subject(P =.010) and complement(P =.002). Given that 1) Chinese learners tend to use more verbs rather than nominals in realizing the functions which nominals are supposed to serve by native speakers, and 2) that the obvious lack of cohesive devices in nonnative speakers‘ abstracts, which are congruent with their L1, the evidence of L1 transfer is thus testified to exist. In addition, students have confessed in personal interview that they are not familiar with nominalization and sometimes adopted the avoidance strategy in using it, especially using wh-clause nominalization.Despite some limitations, the study not only helps to unveil the complicated nature of nominalization which is still not well understood and poorly used by most of the Chinese English learners, but offers some useful suggestions for teaching English nominalization in the nonnative classroom setting. |
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