A Corpus-based Study On English Nominalization In Graduation Theses Of Chinese Postgraduates Majoring In English

Since Jespersen's first attempt in 1924, substantial theoretical studies have been done on nominalization. Among all the theoretical studies on nominalization, the systemic-functional perspective is more profound and systematic because rather than being restricted to syntactic analysis, it expands to the study of textual functions of nominalizations in written English by associating nominalization with grammatical metaphor. Since then, under the theoretical framework of systemic-functional grammar, some qualitative and empirical researches have been conducted based on authentic texts. The qualitative studies mainly specify the functions of nominalization in discourse, while the previous empirical studies on nominalization mainly focused on two aspects, stylistic features of nominalization and nominalization acquisition of Chinese students. The finding concerning the first aspect is unanimous, that is, nominalization frequency is in direct proportion to the formality of texts, but researches pertaining to the second aspect are somewhat controversial in findings and few in number. Some of the corpus-based studies (Xi,2006 & Wu,2009) proved that the difference between Chinese learners and native users in nominalization is significant, while others (Wang & Chen,2008) reported that the difference is insignificant. Besides, the subjects of earlier empirical studies on nominalization are mostly Chinese undergraduates and the corpus is mostly composed of examination compositions, which means that the subjects are viewed as English learners rather than English users. Therefore the author chooses as subjects postgraduates majoring in English, who are supposed to be advanced English users when they write their graduation theses using English as a language tool. What's more, most of the quantitative researches on nominalization are based on specifically chosen texts or small corpora, so it is necessary to verify the findings and further the research using large-scale corpora.Based on the two corpora established by the author herself from electronic sources online, the corpus of 120 academic journal articles by professional English users and the corpus of graduation these by Chinese postgraduates majoring in English, the current study probes into the question whether Chinese postgraduates majoring in English, as advanced users of English, use nominalization in their graduation theses as proficiently as professional English users in their academic journal articles and explores the internal difference among Chinese postgraduates majoring in English from different types of universities in their use of nominalizations in writings. With the help of the concordance software Wordsmith and the descriptive software SPSS, the author makes contrasts between professional English users and Chinese postgraduates and among postgraduates from different types of universities based on Independent-Samples T tests and leads to the following conclusions.From a macroscopic perspective, there exists a significant difference between nominalizations used by postgraduates and professional English users in their writings and the total number of nominalizations used in postgraduate English majors'graduations theses surpasses that in professional English users'academic journal articles. Microscopic study of each of the ten categories of nominalization finds that this overuse results from the overuse of nominalizations ending with -tion, -ness and -ance by Chinese postgraduates. The reasons for this overuse are Chinese postgraduates'repeated use of certain words due to smaller active vocabulary and the topics of writing, with the former being the main reason. What's more, Chinese postgraduates of English majors show a significant deficiency in using nominalizations ending with -acy and for nominalizations ending with-sion, -ment, -ence, -ity, -ery and -ency, there is no significant difference between the two groups of English users. Besides, the sequences of the ten categories of nominalizations based on quantity in the two corpora are similar with only a tiny difference.As for postgraduates from different types of universities, the finding is that in the use of nominalizations as a whole, postgraduates from universities of foreign languages and comprehensive universities are more competent than those from universities of science and technology, because t tests show that there is no significant difference between professional English users and postgraduates from universities of foreign languages as well as comprehensive universities in the use of nominalization as a whole, while for postgraduates from universities of science and technology, the difference is significant. Microscopic study shows that, in one way or another, postgraduates from all these three types of universities can be different from professional English users. Postgraduates from universities of science and engineering are significantly different from professional English users in -tion,-ance and -ery nominalizations. Postgraduates from universities of foreign languages are significantly different from professional English users in -tion and -ness nominalizations, and postgraduates from comprehensive universities significantly different in -ment and -acy nominalizations.The qualitative analysis part of this thesis points out that nominalization is important both in quantity and in quality and that Chinese postgraduates majoring in English are basically correct and reasonable in their use of nominalization.