| Nominalization is an important characteristic to distinguish bet ween written and spoken English.It has the function of enhancing coherence,accuracy,simplification and objectivity.Therefore,it is very important for Chinese students to under stand and master the nominalization knowledge in English abstract of master’ s thesis.Although many scholars have discussed the reasons of the frequent occurrence and the special functions of nominalization in English scientific paper,there are few researches on master’s thesis of electrical engineering.In addition,most scholars use a single qualitative or quantitative analysis method to study nominalization.In order to further improve the objectivity and accuracy of the research results,this paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to make a statistical analysis of the corpus of Chinese students and native English speakers.The aim is to improve the writing quality of English abstract of electrical engineering master thesis.Guided by Halliday’s nominalization theory under the framework of systemic functional grammar,this study selected 55 and 60 academic pap ers from top journals of domestic famous universities and international electrical engineering,respectively,to create the corpus,and retrieved all nominalization by using Antconc software and analyzed the data.The study found that in the English abstract of electrical engineering papers: Lexical nominalization is much more than clausal nominalization.Verb nominalization is much higher than adjective nominalization.Lexical nominalization focuses on derivative nouns,and verb derivation is the most commonly used means of nominalization.Clausal nominalization usually uses the abstract noun phrase structure "noun + preposition" and seldom uses the nomi nal clause guided by "wh-".Generally speaking,in the English abstracts of Chinese students’ electrical engineering papers,the use of nominalization is very common,but it simply pursues the number of words used,ignoring the diversity of vocabulary and the quality of the article.At the lexical level,there are significant differences in the use of verb derivation,verb conversion and adjective derivation between Chinese students and native writers.At the clause level,there are statistically significant differences between Chinese students and native English writers in the use of the predicative clause guided by "that",subject clause guided by "how",and the abstract noun phrase structure" abstract noun + preposition(of/into/within).On the basis of this research,teachers should adopt more teaching methods in the process of classroom teaching to help students’ master nominalization faster.At the same time,while improving the awareness of nominalization,students should also use it reasonably and appropriately according to the genre and discourse features,so as to improve their English abstract writing ability and English writing level. |
