The Comparison Study On Nominalization Of English Abstracts From Academic Papers Written By Chinese And Americans

This paper makes a statistic analysis on nominalization in English abstracts of chemistry academic papers between Chinese writers and native writers. One of the most prominent features of English for science and technology is nominalization, and abstract is a very important part of academic paper. Therefore, nominalization in abstract part directly decides whether the abstract is formal, concise and coherent. There are obvious difference in abstracts written by Chinese writers and native writers. This paper makes a research on the usage of nominalization and tries to find the difference between the two and help Chinese writers to improve their abstract writing.This paper is composed of five parts.The first part is introduction. It mainly introduces the object, research questions and background. Nominalization plays an important role in abstract of EST papers. Nominalization frequency and proper usage of nominalization decides whether the abstract is nice or not. It is helpful for Chinese writers to write a better abstract to compare the usage of nominalization in abstract written by Chinese writers and the abstracts written by native writers. So far, there are so few researches on this and not systematic enough. Therefore, the writer of this paper tries to make a new try in this field.Chapter two introduces the concept of nominalization and nominalization is the basic characteristic of written texts. The functional linguists think that nominalization is one of the main tools that realize grammatical metaphor and nominalization directly influences the expression of written text.In the third chapter, research method, data collection and tools in the research are introduced. 40 English abstracts of PHD paper from Jilin University chemistry department and 40 from Clarkson University are selected. The tool used in this research is C++ and it is a popular internet tool which is used to count the numbers of nominalization. To make sure the number correct, handpicking is also used.The forth chapter makes 40 abstracts written by Chinese and 40 written by Americans as corpus and compares the nominalization frequency, nominalization frequency of different types of nominalization and distributions of nominalizations. The results indicates that nominalization frequency affects the formality of abstract but the nominalization frequency difference between the two is smaller than supposed.The last chapter is conclusion.Through the statistical research there are slightly differences between the abstract written by Chinese and the ones written by Americans. The correct usage of nominalization affects the formality, conciseness and coherence of abstract.In the last, this paper only compares the nominalization between the Chinese abstracts and native abstracts, and there are only slightly differences between the two. What are the reasons? There are still many problems to be resolved.