A Contrastive Study Of Nominalization In English Informative Abstracts In Journal Papers

With the emergence of international search system, abstracts of journal papers have become a highly concentrated and relatively independent style, and offer great convenience for science and technology workers, who are able to search useful information through abstracts more conveniently and more efficiently. (Xu Jin, Hu Xiaoxi, 2003) Informative abstracts as one of the abstracts provide a large number of concrete methods, processes, results and discussions about the research, and this kind of abstract is widely used over the academic circles.Nominalization, as one of the most important characteristics of written language and formal register possesses the functions of improving cohesion, conciseness, formality and objectivity. This thesis is intended to analyze the informative abstracts from the perspective of nominalization, and probe into how nominalization plays its role in informative abstract writing, aiming to promote the quality of English abstract writing.Since the subject of this study is the nominalization in the informative English abstract of journal papers, 20 informative abstracts from Progress in Geography and Foreign Language World are chosen to build CWC corpus, and then another 20 informative abstracts from Urban geography and ELT Journal are chosen respectively to build NWC corpus.Since the present study was conducted in a corpus-based approach, the concordance tools including Antconc 3.2.1 and UAM Corpus Tool and SPSS (statistical Package for Social Sciences) as statistical tools are adopted in this study.The study attempts to find out the answers to the following questions:(1) Are there any differences in the use of nominalization between CWC and NWC?(2) Are there any differences in the use of lexical density between CWC and NWC?(3) What are the possible reasons for the similarity and differences between CWC and NWC?In order to find out the results, firstly, the scope of nominalization is defined in a broad sense, defining nominalization in lexical level, semi-clausal level and clausal level, and this thesis further explores nominalization from the following aspects: basic classification of nominalization, semantic classification of nominalization, morphological classification of nominalization and transitivity of nominalization, and then retrieves each type of nominalization of the two corpora respectively by concordance. Secondly, this thesis makes a general descriptive analysis of the statistical data and seeks out the similarities and differences from the general classification—semantic changes, morphological changes and transitivity of nominalization between the two corpora. Thirdly, Independent Samples T-test is applied to ensure the precision and credibility of the results. Then these selected abstracts are analyzed from the perspective of lexical density. On these basis of analyzing the similarities and differences of each type of nominalizations, the thesis draws a conclusion that cultural differences, language ability, teaching tradition and other factors such as Chinese writer's sense of avoiding mistakes lead to the differences. Finally, some pedagogical suggestions in teaching English abstract writing are offered.In summary, the research enriches the study of nominalization and corpus and could be used for a reference to the writing of English abstracts for Chinese students and scholars.