A Comparative Study On Nominalization Of English Abstract In Terms Of Lexical Cohesion

It is an essential and indispensable part in an excellent academic thesis,because it provides convenient tools for literature search system to collect academic papers.English abstract of an academic paper,as an independent genre,is directly related to the disseminating and communicating of scientific research achievements all over the world.Thus,improving English abstract writing contributes to promote the academic competitiveness of Chinese scholars in the whole world.Without doubt,a good English abstract must be meaningful,logical,concise and coherent in textual level.Nominalizations reflect language use,which plays important roles in the quality of language use,especially,the professional literature.Nominalizations,as common phenomenon in the academic paper,are always defined as verbs,adjectives,other parts of speech,and structures serving as nominals in clauses.It will make the content of paper more concise,objective,formal and authoritative.Researchers begin to know more deeply about nominalization through the following four main linguistic schools: structuralistic linguistics,transformation-generative linguistics,systemic-functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics.The four major linguistic schools give different definitions about nominalization.Scholars generally agree that systemic functional linguists have a systematic and comprehensive way to study nominalization.This research combines Halliday‘s ideas on nominalization with other researchers,mainly Quirk(1985)et al.and Biber et al.(1999)divides the classifications of nominalization into two types,lexical and clausal.Lexical nominalization includes verbal nominalization and adjective nominalization.Clause nominalization means to transfer at the same level of internal language,including nominalization of –ing gerunds clause,nominalization of to-infinitive clause,and nominalization of clause.Halliday says ?The quality of texture depends partly on cohesion and partly on structure.? Cohesion,as an important component of a discourse,plays an important role in the coherence of a discourse,so many linguists arouse the interests to study cohesion.Ever since Halliday and Hasan published the famous book Cohesion in English in 1976,the concept of cohesion is widely paid attention by many linguists.In the book,they divide the cohesion into five categories: reference,substitution,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion.The former four categories belong to grammar cohesion.Furthermore,lexical cohesion includes two categories: reiteration and collocation.Reiteration also can be divided into four categories including repetition,synonym or near-synonym,superordinate,and general words.Collocation mainly involves antonym and some ordered series.Many researchers have explored the application of nominalization and lexical cohesion,but there are less attentions paid to the comparative study on English abstracts nominalization in terms of lexical cohesion,especially,Chinese and native English students.This research compares the English abstracts from master thesis written by Chinese students and native English students based on lexical cohesion in nominalization.The two corpuses of English abstracts selected from PDQT and CNKI are a total of 60 master thesis published in 2016,30 respectively.The two corpuses are marked manually based on the classification of lexical nominalization and lexical cohesion.With the help of a tool,Ant Conc,combined with quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,the data is automatically counted and analyzed.The aim of the research is going to find out the features of nominalization and lexical cohesion in the English abstracts written by the Chinese students and native English students.There are two research questions:1)What are the similarities and differences of nominalizations and lexical cohesions used by native English students and Chinese students in the English abstracts?2)What are the similarities and differences in the percentage of lexical cohesions in nominalizations used by native English students and Chinese students?As the stated above,there is no statistically significant differences between the two corpuses‘ use of nominalizations and lexical cohesions,however,the percentage of lexical cohesions in nominalizations used by Chinese students is much lower than native English students.Findings show that there are some more similarities than differences using nominalizations and lexical cohesions between Chinese students and native English students.The similarities lie in the total amount of words of nominalizations and total amount of types of nominalizations used in the two corpuses.More apparently,in all samples,the occurrences of verbal-nominalizations are used more than adjectives-nominalizations.The findings also show that the percentage of nominalizations used by native English students is higher than by Chinese students.And the adjective-nominalizations used by Chinese students are higher than by native English students.Besides,in both corpuses,the frequency of reiterations is more than the frequency of collocations and repetitions are used more than other types of reiteration.The main differences between Chinese students and native English students are showed that the percentage of reiterations and collocations used by native English students is higher than that by Chinese students.What‘s more,the percentage of synonym and some order series used by Chinese students is higher than by native English students.The percentage of lexical cohesions in nominalizations used by Chinese students is much lower than native English students.It is unavoidable to have some deficiencies and defects in this research.Further study should pay attention to the subjects,gender and age when selecting samples.Other classifications of nominalization should also be examined.