A Comparative Study Of Nominalization In English Abstracts Of Research Articles For Social Sciences

This paper, based on the theoretical framework of Halliday’s Grammatical Metaphor, aims to investigate the nominalization uses in English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and by native English scholars. For this purpose, random sampling was adopted and eight self-built corpora were established, and totally 360 English abstracts written by Chinese and native English scholars across four disciplines in social sciences were collected and tagged manually for easy concordance retrieval and frequency calculation. Statistical package(SPSS), quantitative approach and contrastive analysis were adopted to analyze the English abstracts.The results show that there exist similarities and differences in the use of nominalization between English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and native English scholars. Regarding the interlingual differences in frequency of nominalization, there is significant difference in the overall use of nominalization and in the use of process nominalization, but no significant differences in the use of quality, circumstance, relator and zero nominalizations. As for the interdisciplinary differences in frequency of nominalization, there is significant difference in the use of relator nominalization in English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and of process nominalization in English abstracts written by native English scholars. With reference to the nominalization patterning, the two patternings in percentage in English abstracts written by Chinese scholars and native English scholars are similar and the different disciplines also share similar nominalization patterning, with process nominalization taking a dominating proportion, quality nominalization a certain proportion and circumstance, relator and zero nominalizations rather tiny or no proportions.The study comes up with fruitful results in exploring nominalization use in research articles abstracts and corpus research, and this study also provides help for Chinese scholars majoring in these disciplines read and write EST research articles abstracts in their own fields more efficiently.