A Contrastive Study Of English Nominalization In Abstracts Of Science And Technology Research Papers

English of science and technology (EST) has its unique stylistic features, and one of the most typical one is the frequent use of nominalization. Due to the particular role abstracts play in research article reading and publication, it is essential for Chinese graduates to understand and master nominalization use in abstracts of EST. However, there has been little empirical work done in analyzing nominalization use in abstracts of EST academic papers so far, and even less contrastive study of nominalization use between different cultures and different disciplines.In this paper, random sampling was adopted and eight self-built corpora were built, and totally 384 abstracts written by Chinese writers and English native writers across four disciplines were obtained. All the corpora were tagged by hand so that we can retrieve concordance and count nominalization frequency easily.The nominalization frequency and the position nominalization occupies in a sentence in these abstracts were identified and compared regarding cultures and disciplines. The holistic comparison of nominalization frequency by Chinese writers (CWs) and English native writers (NWs) shows that CWs use much less nominalization in abstracts of EST academic papers. By comparing the nominalization frequency used by Chinese writers and English native writers across four chosen disciplines, we find that CWs in the field of medicine use much more nominalization than NWs, while there was no significant difference by CWs and NWs in mathematics, computer science and agriculture. As to the position nominalization occupies in a sentence, CWs in medicine use nominalization in a more appropriate way than those in the other three disciplines, and CWs in agriculture use nominalization in the least appropriate way. Finally, in order to find out the possible causes, we conducted interviews of eight PhD candidates. Their answers suggested that no textbooks for EST academic paper writing of their major, their teachers'lack of study on nominalization and first language transfer are the most possible causes. The study comes up with fruitful results in exploring nominalization use in EST academic paper abstracts and corpus research, and this study also provides help for Chinese graduates or academics majoring in these disciplines read and write EST academic paper abstracts in their own fields more efficiently.