A Study Of Chinese English Learner’s Acquisition Of Nominalization From The Perspective Of Decategorization

Nominalization (or nominalisation) refers to the process or result of transformingverb or adjective into noun which is a vital process in obtaining textual formality andobjectivity. Since the1960s, nominalization has become one of the hot issues oflinguistics. However, the research of the acquisition of nominalization is far fromfruitful compared with other research areas. Predecessors mainly investigate thedistinction in the use frequency of nominalization between the Chinese English learnersand native English speakers. And few researches concern the acquisition of the meaningof nominalization, let alone the cognitive mechanism behind the acquisition ofnominalization. This present thesis argues that, since nominalization itself is the productof cognitive process of decategorization, the acquisition of the meaning by the learnersmay probably be affected by decategorizing competence as well.This thesis chooses postgraduates of native English speakers and that of Englishmajors and non-English majors in China, and explores the acquisition of nominalizationby the Chinese English learners based on abstracts of graduate theses.We select110abstracts of theses by native English speakers from the ProQuest,55abstracts of theses by English major postgraduates in China from5language-orienteduniversities and45abstracts of theses by non-English major postgraduates in Chinafrom5comprehensive universities, and each of the overall number of letters in the threegroups is around16500letters.Based on the corpora, this thesis attempts to answer two questions,1) whether thereexists positive correlation between the frequency of nominalization and Englishproficiency;2) what is it like in the application of verb meaning and semantic meaningin the nominalization by the learners, and what is the difference compared with thenative speakers. These two questions combined will probe into the acquisition ofsemantic meaning in nominalization, and the role that decategorization competenceplays in the acquisition of nominalization. After ruling out the nouns that cannot be included in the study and judging the useof nominalization based on grammatical and semantic constituents, we have found someresults that are different from previous studies.1) the frequency of nominalization is notin positive correlation to English proficiency. This study finds that non-English majorpostgraduates yield the highest frequency of nominalization, followed respectively bythe English major postgraduates and native speakers of English.2) in the acquisition ofsemantic meaning of nominalization, Chinese English learners report varied differencesfrom the native speakers. In general, significant differences exist in the acquisition ofverb meaning between the Chinese English learners and the native speakers, whereChinese English learners more frequently use the sentence pattern of “a verbose verb+nominalization”. In addition, among the Chinese English learners, the non-Englishmajors score lower than the English majors in the acquisition of discourse function ofnoun, to be specific, in the frequent application of consecutive nominalizations. Thesetwo cases can hardly be seen in the corpus of native speakers. This reflects that thefailure in acquiring the verb semantic meaning of nominalization relatively well by theChinese English learners is closely linked to their decategorization competence. Furthermore, this thesis provides evidence for the excessive use of nominalization concludedby Wilkins on the basis of the corpus of native speakers and the corpus of foreignlanguage learners.Decategorization is a notion related not only to linguistics, but also to cognitiveconcepts as well. This thesis holds that, due to the influence from decategorization, thedecategorization is insufficient in the acquisition of the meaning of nominalization bythe Chinese English learners, which gives rise to the misuse and abuse ofnominalization and thus shows little resemblance to that of the native speakers.