NOMINALISATION
In many professional registers, above all in written genres, the use of nominalization has become extremely common. Superficially, it consists of the use of a nominal form, such as ‘starvation’ in the following text, instead of the corresponding verb ‘starve’, from which the nominal is derived. Other examples from the text are:
accuracy derived from the adjective ‘accurate’
explanation derived from ‘explain’
increase has the same form as the verb ‘increase’
speed has the same form as the verb ‘speed’
It has been known for nearly a century that starvation for about two weeks1 increases the speed and accuracy of mental processes,2 especially mental arithmetic.3 This is probably the explanation of the huge increase in self-starvation among young women doing academic work.4 An extreme form of this condition known as ‘anorexia nervosa’5 is now common and our studies6 have shown that in 75% of cases7 they start crash-dieting8 in the year in which they are working for a major examination.
It is clear that nominalization is no mere substitute for a verb or adjective, however. Instead, the use of a nominalized expression requires an entirely different organization of the whole sentence, and indeed a completely different semantic conceptualization. In this way, a great deal of information, which would otherwise be expressed as verbs, adjectives and PPs, is packed into the nominal groups. The result is very long, dense NGs, which tend to be abstractions, instead of referring to concrete persons who act as Agents. In fact, personal participant subjects in heavily nominalized styles tend to be no longer the head of the NG.
A non-nominalized equivalent of the first four NGs in the extract above might look something like this:
1 If you/people starve for about two weeks, 2 you/they think faster and more accurately, 3 especially when doing arithmetic; 4 This probably explains why young women who are doing academic work starve themselves.
One reason for the use of nominalization is that it is shorter than the non-nominalized form. More important, the nominalized form encapsulates a whole situation in one word, such as ‘self-starvation’, ‘crash-dieting’. Because density and brevity prevail over clarity, heavy nominalization can become difficult to understand in unfamiliar contexts. For those familiar with the subject-matter, on the other hand, nominalization provides them with a kind of shorthand by which complex concepts and processes are easily handled without further explanation. All adult speakers of English handle at least some specialized registers such as education, business, sport, etc. and pick up nominalized expressions such as ‘infant primary schools’ or ‘mixed comprehensive schools’. Such expressions become relatively fixed until new cultural developments give rise to new combinations – something which is happening in all areas of life.
