An Empirical Study Of Nominalization In Argumentative Writings By Chinese English Majors

Nominalization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human languages. As the most widely used language in the world, English is highly nominalized and the phenomenon of nominalization in English attracts wide concern from different linguistic schools all the time. Since the pioneering research by Jespersen, Structuralism, Generative Grammar, Functionalism as well as Cognitive Grammar all make their own contribution to the research of English nominalization, among which functionalists’ study is considered to be more systemic and in-depth, because they contribute not only to the research of nominalization at the syntactic level, i.e. the generative mechanism and the patterns of nominalization, but also digs into its function in discourse level, which considers nominalization as the main characteristic of adult and formal register. The adoption of nominalization would fulfill the functions such as enhancing the formality of the discourse, promoting the lexical density as well as achieving textual cohesion. Therefore, functional research on nominalization provides the theoretical foundation for the current paper.The research on nominalization in China in recent years mainly focuses on the stylistic features of nominalization and EFL learners’ acquisition of such a technique. As of the researches on EFL learners’ acquisition of nominalization, different scholars hold different opinions. There are two reasons for such discrepancy: on the one hand, different scholars ground their research on different ranges of nominalization, some on just lexical level, some on syntactic level, thus different conclusions may be generated; on the other hand, although the sample writings in their research are argumentative compositions, they are not of the same topic, which may cause the discrepancy at the beginning. Thus, based on a more comprehensive classification of nominalization by Heyvaert and sample writings of the same topic, the current paper aims to reveal the acquisition status of nominalization by Chinese English majors.The subjects for this paper are 128 freshman and junior English majors from a university in Hunan province. Two corpora FS and JS are established by timed composition and then retrieved and analyzed by Ant Conc 3.4.4 and SPSS 19.0 respectively with the hope to answer the following questions: 1. Do juniors use more nominalizations than freshmen? 2. What are the characteristics in the use of nominalization by freshmen and juniors? 3. Do the instances of nominalization in English majors’ writings perform their due functions? And what are the problems involved?The research shows that: 1. The frequency of nominalization in the subjects’ writings positively correlates with their English proficiency, which is consistent with Wang Lifei and Chen Gong’s research, while contradictory with Sun Jieyu and Cong Yingxu’s. 2. There are both similarity and difference in the use of nominalization by juniors and freshmen. The similarity lies in that the frequency of each kind of nominalization follows more or less the same order, which reflects the same acquisition orders of Chinese EFL learners. The significant difference in the use of nominalization by the two groups of subjects is only observed in the lexical level. And within each category of lexical nominalization, juniors show much diversity in their use. In general, Chinese EFL learners prefer to use syntactic nominalizations rather than lexical ones, and they have the tendency to employ nominalizations as objects instead of subjects. 3. Although a majority of nominalizations adopted by the subjects have fulfilled their due function, there are also lots of improper uses, such as the overuse of personal pronouns, delexical allocations and cohesive conjunctions.Based on the above findings, the author of the current paper puts forward the following suggestions to improve the acquisition status of nominalization by Chinese EFL learners: firstly, when designing the syllabus, language teachers need to bear in mind that the acquisition of nominalization also follows a natural order; secondly, more diversified topics of composition should be provided to Chinese EFL learners so as to help them to slip the leash of some high frequency suffixes; thirdly, explicit teaching is needed in promoting Chinese EFL learners’ nominalization abilities; lastly, Chinese EFL learners’ output should also be focused on.