A Corpus-based Study On Functions Of Nominalization In Agricultural Engineering English Texts

Nominalization is one of the most typical characteristics in English written language.Due to characteristics of high lexical density and large amount of information,nominalization is often used in scientific English discourse.So far,linguists have been studying the phenomenon of nominalization in English papers of science and technology,but the research on functions of nominalization in agricultural engineering English texts is still rare.T his paper takes the functions of nominalization from the perspective of functional grammar as the theory and takes self-constructed agricultural engineering English corpus as research objectives to study the functions of nominalization in agricultural engineering English texts.During analysis,it was observed that the writer mainly studies distributions of nominalization suffixes and their high-frequency words that are embodied in agricultural engineering English texts through the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.In the corpus data collection and processing process,the document format converter software is used to convert the PDF texts into the word texts and manually converts the word texts into the TXT format texts.This corpus collects 100 articles from Bioresource Technology,the top agricultural engineering journal in the world.The total size of self-constructed corpus is over 492,563 running words.The study uses the Concordance Plot function,Word List function,and Keyword List function in the Ant Conc 3.4.4w(Windows)2014 software to identify the suffixes density.Because the h igh-frequency words of various nominalization suffixes with the typical features can reflect functions of nominalization in agricultural engineering English texts,those words are manually extracted out.Furthermore,British National Corpus(BYU-BNC)World is used as the reference corpus.This study shows:(1)Nominalization is one of the main lexical transformation ways in agricultural engineering English texts,and the frequencies of deverbal nouns and verbal nouns are higher than the frequency of de-adjectival nouns.(2)There are significant differences between the target corpus and the reference corpus in the frequency of each studied nominal suffix,among which the suffixes “-ation(s)”,“-ment(s)”,“-ing(s)”,and “-ity(ies)” have occupied the most proportion in agricultural engineering English texts corpus.(3)The functions of nominalization can be reflected objectivity,conciseness,formality,and cohesion in agricultural engineering English texts.(4)More concise the texts are and more formal the texts become in agricultural engineering English texts.This research promotes the deep development of English nominalization research theories and methods,extends the application of corpus technology in the research of nominal function,and analyzes the specific practice and guiding value of nominalization in writing agricultural engineering English texts.This research can help the professionals,who engage in agricultural engineering and have the willingness to publish SCI papers,interpret the phenomenon of nominalization and improve their abilities to apply nominalization in agricultural engineering English papers.It also provides them a kind of research methods to a constructed small-scale English corpus,which is convenient for them to write and publish higher level papers faster and better.