A Comparative Study On Nominalizations In Academic Journal Article Abstracts By English Writers And Chinese Writers

The author managed to make a statistical analysis and comparison onnominalizations presented in the abstracts of journal articles by Chinese writers andEnglish writers in this thesis. The journal articles are chosen from the discipline oflinguistics and applied linguistics. As a kind of discourse of English for science andtechnology, English journal articles are characterized with the frequent use ofnominalizations, with no exception to the abstract part. There are considerableresearches on comparative analysis of nominalizations in recent years, but mostresearches mainly deal with the comparison of nominalizations in different languages.Comparative studies on English nominalizations used by writers from differentcultural backgrounds are rarely touched upon.The present study aims at a comparative study on the English nominalizations byEnglish writers and Chinese writers based on abstracts collected from journals fromApplied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching and Research. For the researchmethod, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted. After carefulexamination, the author found that English abstracts written by English writers andChinese writers show great similarities as well as differences in terms of the use ofnominalizations. The author aims to present these similarities and differences from theperspective of Systemic Functional Grammar.After analyzing the data, some findings are made as follows:①Nominalizations used by English writers and Chinese writers show more similaritiesthan differences. Similarities lie in the percentage of nominalizations in total words,the frequency of occurrences of different types of nominalizations.②Both groups ofwriters use far more nominalizations transformed from verbs than those fromadjectives. For nominalizations reworded from verbs, both group writers use morenominalizations of self reference than those of other reference.③The morphologicalstructure of nominalizations in both groups of abstracts also show great similarities.That is derivation is the most typical way of nominalizations.④The major differenceslie in the syntactic patterns of realization of rank-shift nominalizations. Specifically,English writers tend to use more prepositions than Chinese writers in nominalizationstructures. However Chinese writers tend to use more independent nominalizations asthe subject of a clause. English writers use more nominalizations of “Process-Fact”(nominal clauses) than Chinese writers.⑤Differences can also be noticed in thedistribution of nominalizations in Theme and Rheme organization: a good number ofnominalizations occur in rheme in abstracts by English writers, while in abstracts byChinese writers, nominalizations are distributed in Theme and Rheme Organization ina balanced manner.The present thesis is outlined into five chapters. In chapter one, the author givesan introductive presentation for the background of the study including the researchobject, research questions as well as recent researching tendency about EST. InChapter two, the author mainly reviews researches on nominalizations from differentschools of linguistics, namely Analytical Syntactics, Transformational-Grammar, Systemic-Functional Grammar and Cognitive Grammar and recent studies ofnominalizations in China are also included in this chapter. After giving a generalpicture of studies of nominalizations, the author briefly reviews previous study onabstracts. In the chapter three, research method is first introduced; both quantitativeand qualitative methods are comprehensively adopted by the thesis and following theintroduction of research method is description of how the data are collected. Next, theauthor offers the instrument used by the present thesis. Then, from the systemicfunctional perspective, the author presents the rationale of the thesis. That is hownominalizations are classified, recognized and realized. Last but not the least, theauthor describes research procedure based on the theoretical support. In Chapter four,based on previous work, findings and discussions are presented. In the findings part,major similarities and differences of nominalizations used by English writers andChinese writers are summarized. Following the findings are the related discussions onnominalization as linguistic competence, the co-occurrence of prepositions andnominalizations as well as the motivations of the differences in the use ofnominalizations by the two groups of writers. Based on what is above, the authorconcludes the study in Chapter five, in which the author first makes a summary of thethesis and the implication and limitation of the thesis are discussed. At last, the authoroffers some suggestions for further studies of nominalizations.