Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Examining the application of nominalization in segmented abstracts: a corpus-based study

Examining the application of nominalization in segmented abstracts: a corpus-based study 1IntroductionResearch articles are an important constituent of scientific genres. Textual organization and linguistic choices are required in research articles (Lim, 2006). Analysing research articles has practical reasons that its formal style makes it distinguished from other genres, and therefore, for scholars, an academic style is conducive to obtaining international recognition from publishing papers; for learners, raising the awareness of differences of text expression and organization in discourse can facilitate the learning and understanding of academic writings (Arizavi et al., 2015).Academic writing has the feature of abstraction, objectivity, condensation, technicality, authoritativeness, high lexical density, and internal reasoning (Fang, 2005; Halliday, 1998; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Hamp-Lyons & Heasley, 2006; Hyland, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2004; Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003; Snow, 2010), which require the adoption of grammatical metaphors (GMs), particularly nominalization. From the linguistic point of view, the high frequency of nominalized structures is one of the most conspicuous features of academic science writing (Biber & Gray, 2013). Furthermore, more uses of nominalization are associated with more specialized technicality (Thompson, 2004).Abstracts, as the most concise part in research articles, consist of the most various kinds of information, including research objectives, methods, results, and even implications and suggestions. Hence, abstracts are required to be concise and informative, which calls for a large amount use of nominalizations to realize multiple functions. Although a few studies have tapped into the analysis of abstracts (Holtz, 2009, 2011; Prasithrathsint, 2014), in this study, a special type of abstract, segmented abstracts, was explored concerning the different use of nominalizations in distinct parts within the segmented abstracts.Segmented abstracts are a new format to illustrate required the information of research articles. The segmented abstract is not only a distributed writing construction for authors to demonstrate the content of research articles but also a clear reading construction for readers to seek information and know the newest research results. The position at the beginning also highlights the importance of segmented abstracts in academic articles. The exploration of nominalization in published segmented abstracts can identify the distribution and function of nominalizations. Therefore, scholars can learn about the usage of nominalizations to have a better understanding of the nominalizations in segmented abstracts and create qualified segmented abstracts.2Literature review2.1Grammatical metaphorGM is an important part of systemic functional linguistics. It refers to a non-congruent way of reconstructing language, substituting one grammatical class or structure for another, realigning the relationship between semantic meaning and grammatical structure, and expanding the meaning potential (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin & Rose, 2007).GM is believed to be the core of academic and scientific discourse (Ravelli, 2003). It has the capability to repack grammar through decoupling and recombining meanings and words of use, making the complex language into abstract entities, using the logical chain to connect these entities, and developing reasoning to support arguments through objective presentation (Halliday, 1998; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Schleppegrell, 2004; Thompson, 2004).In scientific texts, through GM, technical and scientific terms or entities can be created, and cause-and-effect relations can be established as well as the reasoning within them (Kazemian & Hashemi, 2014). More uses of GM brings along more information load and lexical density (Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003).GM is classified into ideational GM (IGM) and interpersonal GM. IGM is a metaphor realized through transitivity, permitting the variation between congruent and incongruent meanings and wordings (Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003; Thompson, 2004). It performs the functions of condensing information, compacting language, and creating scientific terms (Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013). IGM serves the functions of lexical density, objectivity, and technicality, which is consistent with the objective, abstract, and formal features of academic writing (Kazemian et al., 2013; Shahab & Asl, 2015).2.2NominalizationAccording to Halliday (1994) and Thompson (2004), nominalization is considered the most powerful tool to realize IGM, which includes processing meaning in a nominal form.Nominalization is the main lexico-grammatical feature of academic and written language (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). It has been regarded as a form to package information in an economical way, and thus it has played an important role in scientific writing (Banks, 2005; Fang et al., 2006; Halliday, 2004). The conciseness and condensation brought by nominalization allow expert readers to extract abundant information quickly and efficiently from relatively short texts (Biber & Gray, 2010). The process of nominalization acquires some qualities of entities that are compatible with scientific writing for solid, stable, and fixed quality (Banks, 2003). Furthermore, the application of nominalization in scientific writing has shown an increasing tendency (Banks, 2003; Biber et al., 1998).Using nominalization can make discourse more concise, objective, and formal (Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013). Studies have shown that native English speakers and more experienced second-language writers tend to use nominalization more in academic writing (Arizavi et al., 2015; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Sarani & Talati-Baghsiahi, 2015). In addition, the necessity of nominalization has been emphasized by Halliday and Webster (2009) because the reasoning in scientific texts is developed by interdependence between information that the previous information should be restated later, which can be achieved by nominalization.As the most common resource for establishing ideational metaphors, nominalization first occurred in scientific and technical discourse (Halliday, 1994). It can transform an action or a process into a concept and thus create abstract meaning, condense more information into nominal groups, reduce the number of clauses, and create a concise writing style, which is in harmony with science writing (Thompson, 2004). The function of nominalization mainly involves three aspects. The first is information condensation. It encapsulates meanings into nominal groups that are tightly information loaded, and thus the information volume and lexical density increase; moreover, the objective and abstract expression can be achieved (Kazemian et al., 2013; Zhang, 2018). The second aspect is discourse coherence construction. It functions as a theme to restate given information, escaping the repeated mention of the previous information, and also performs as a rheme to present new information, which is similar to scientific texts that offer new information on the basis of aforementioned arguments (Jalilifar & Shirali, 2014). This function can be applied as a cohesive device for its referential linking (Baratta, 2010; Fang et al., 2006; Zhang, 2018), and consequently, it facilitates the information flow within texts (Martin, 2008). The third is subject weakening function. It avoids the expression of agents or doers of the action (Colombi, 2006; Knowles & Moon, 2006), which removes the influence from human beings, and therefore makes texts more objective, especially in scientific writing. Apart from these three, the other functions make an action become a concept (Taverniers, 2004; Webster, 2002). The process of nominalization acquires some qualities of entities that are compatible with scientific writing for solid, stable, and fixed quality (Banks, 2003). In addition, the structure of nominalization facilitates the addition of modifying information, thus enabling the nominalized information to be more focused and serving to highlight or emphasize it (Arizavi et al., 2015).In addition, the use of nominalization varies across disciplines, despite being under the umbrella of academic writing (Holtz, 2011; Jalilifar, et al., 2014; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017). Research on nominalization has focused more on scientific texts. Starting with the historical origins of nominalization in scientific discourse by Banks (2005), the study of nominalization has involved academic texts (Arizavi et al., 2015; Baratta, 2010; Colombi, 2006; Gao, 2012; Halliday, 1993; Heidari Kaidan et al., 2021; Holtz, 2009; Jalilifar, et al., 2014, 2018; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Jalilifar, White et al., 2017; Jalilifar & Shirali, 2014; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Norouzi et al., 2012; Prasithrathsint, 2014; Saffura, 2019; Sarani & Talati-Baghsiahi, 2015; Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013), historical texts (Sušinskienė, 2009), and political and commercial texts (Hadidi & Raghami, 2012).Also, research concerning different chapters within the academic discourse has been included, such as a comparative analysis of the main body of the research article and the abstract (Holtz, 2009, 2011), a study of the use of nominalization in the abstract section (Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019), an in-depth exploration of nominalization in the discussion section (Arizavi et al., 2015), and a study of comparative use of nominalization in the introductory and methodological sections (Jalilifar et al., 2017).2.3Research questionFrom previous studies, the use of nominalization does enhance the conciseness, information capacity and formality of academic texts (Banks, 2005; Biber & Gray, 2013; Fang et al., 2006; Halliday, 2004; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013; Thompson, 2004). Various sections of academic articles accordingly use nominalization to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of the content (Arizavi et al., 2015; Holtz, 2009, 2011; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019), making the use of nominalization a distinctive feature in academic articles.In research articles, the abstract section assumes an important function in that it is at the very beginning of the article and needs to have a very prominent information density. Meanwhile, the abstract is a kind of highly-condensed discourse, requiring accuracy and conciseness; because of the formality and technicality of research articles, consistency and coherence are of great importance (Brusaw, 1982; Corson, 1997). The content of the abstract needs to include the subject of the study, the research methods, the results, and the significance of the study or suggestions for future research. However, this need for high information density has to be achieved in a short space due to the word limit (Bhatia, 1993), so these features of the abstract section require a high need for nominalization to conclude and connect sentences, condense information, make the abstract more concise, and focus more attention on technical terms (Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019; Yue & Zhang, 2019). In previous studies, the abstract section covered a greater amount of information and nominalization was used more frequently in abstracts (Holtz, 2009, 2011; Mahbudi et al., 2014). Furthermore, nominalization in abstracts plays the role of not only condensing information and building discourse coherence but also making technical terms more central, reducing subjectivity, and increasing objectivity, which is an indication of professionalism (Prasithrathsint, 2014).However, in recent years, some academic journals have introduced different specifications for writing the abstract section, moving away from the one-paragraph writing of the past to segmented writing, i.e. requiring a clear division of the abstract content into paragraphs, such as dividing the abstract into sections on the objective of the study, the research methods, the results, and the conclusion. This splitting of the discourse affects the construction of content, and whether the use of nominalization in this varies according to the distinction between different paragraphs and content has not been studied. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate segmented abstracts and to further explore the characteristics of the use of nominalization in abstracts in general and the characteristics and differences among different paragraphs by counting the frequency of the use of different nominalized suffixes by using the method of corpus linguistics. The study of segmented abstracts can contribute to education and learning in English for Specific Purposes (ESP).The research questions are as follows:RQ1:What are the distributional features of nominalizations in different parts of segmented abstracts?RQ2:What are the general characteristics of the nominalizations in segmented abstracts?3Materials and methodsThe research method of corpus linguistics was adopted. A total of 30 recently published abstracts with segmented features from the American Journal of Psychiatry were used to compile the corpus in this study. The American Journal of Psychiatry is the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, the third most widely read and cited psychiatric journal in the field of psychiatry (impact factor 19.242 in 2021) and the most widely read and cited psychiatric journal worldwide (48,015 total citations in 2021). The 30 abstracts were drawn from 7 issues of the American Journal of Psychiatry between 2021 and 2022 (from volume 178, issue 11 to volume 179, issue 5), covering topics including autism, depression, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 7,836 lexical tokens were included in the 30 abstracts.This study used TagAnt to annotate all the lexical tokens that appeared in the abstracts and employed AntConc for subsequent screening using nominalization suffixes. Then, extracting nominalization from the lexical tokens was supplemented by manual secondary annotation. The criterion for nominalization is the transformation of an action or a process into a concept. According to previous studies (Biber, 1988; Holtz, 2009; Jalilifar et al., 2018), nominalization suffixes can be divided into (1) transformations from verbs to nouns (process nominalization), such as develop to development, with query suffixes such as -age (dose to dosage), -al (propose to proposal), -(e)ry (recover to recovery), -sion/-tion (conclude to conclusion), -ment (develop to development), -sis (analyse to analysis), -ure (fail to failure) and -th (grow to growth) and their corresponding plural forms; and (2) conversions from adjectives to nouns (quality nominalization), such as heritable to heritability, with query suffixes such as -ity (dense to density), -ness (thick to thickness), and -ance (important to importance) and their corresponding plural forms. The use of nominalization from nouns is not common in academic discourse, so this study only considers the phenomenon of nominalization from verbs and adjectives (Conrad & Biber, 2001). Furthermore, due to the concentration of the topics in this journal, “depression” and lexical markers in proper nouns (e.g., The Prescription Drug Abuse System) were not taken into account in the analysis of nominalization.4Results4.1Distribution of nominalizations in different paragraphsThe distribution frequency of nominalization in the four paragraphs of each abstract (objective, methods, results, and conclusions) is shown in Table 1. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of nominalization in the overall distribution and in the paragraph distribution. As shown in Table 1, the “Results” section has the most occurrence of nominalizations, with 141 in total. On average, there are 4.7 nominalizations per abstract in the “Results” section. However, in terms of the overall length of the abstract section, the use of nominalization in the “Results” section accounts for 5.25% of the whole section, while the nominalization tokens take 8.80% of the “Conclusions” section. Hence, the “Conclusions” section uses nominalizations most frequently.Table 1:Nominalization across four paragraphs.No.ObjectiveMethodsResultsConclusionsFrequency%Frequency%Frequency%Frequency%132.9421.8732.1343.31221.9621.8710.7154.13300.0010.9300.0010.83465.8810.9364.2675.79532.9400.0042.8421.65643.9254.6796.3821.65776.8698.4164.2664.96810.9821.8742.8464.96954.9065.6185.67108.261054.9010.9353.5554.131110.9821.8753.5521.651221.9643.7474.9632.481310.9832.8042.8432.481410.9854.6721.4243.31151211.7621.8774.9664.961676.8665.6164.2654.131743.9265.6153.5543.311800.0032.8000.0032.481910.9832.8010.7121.652032.9421.8732.1354.13211110.7810.9353.5532.482221.9654.6742.8432.482300.0054.6764.2610.832443.9221.8796.3843.312521.9621.8742.8410.832654.901110.2832.1364.962732.9410.9353.5532.482810.9854.6785.6775.792910.9843.7496.3854.133054.9065.6121.4232.48Σ 102100107100141100121100Table 2:Results of descriptive statistics on the use of nominalization in the overall and paragraph distributions.MeanSD%Abstract15.72.5806.01Objective3.42.9906.53Methods3.62.5285.11Results4.72.5755.25Conclusions4.02.0768.80It is noticeable that a few articles had a significantly higher percentage of nominalizations (11.76, 10.78, 10.28, and 8.26%) than the others. Higher frequencies were found in the “Objective” section (11.76 and 10.78%), the “Methods” section (10.28%), and the “Conclusions” section (8.26%). The “Objective” section in Example 1 added more background to the study, rather than a single statement of study purpose in Example 2. Compared with Example 2, the authors of Example 1 provided background knowledge concerning the current situation, development, and problems before stating the research purpose, making the research objective more reasonable. Instead, the author in Example 2 directly delivered the research objective.Example 1: Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and half of patients with depression have treatment-resistant depression. Intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression but is limited by suboptimal efficacy and a 6-week duration … Here, the authors report the results of a sham-controlled double-blind trial of SNT for treatment-resistant depression (No. 15).Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), a 10-item screen for alcohol use disorder (AUD), have elucidated novel loci for alcohol consumption and misuse. However, these studies also revealed that GWASs can be influenced by numerous biases (e.g., measurement error, selection bias) … The authors used genomic structural equation modeling to elucidate the genetics of alcohol consumption and problematic consequences of alcohol use as measured by AUDIT (No. 21).Example 2: The authors examined directly whether county-level changes in opioid dispensing rates affect individual-level prescription opioid misuse, frequency of use, and dependence, as well as the same outcomes for heroin.Of these, the use of nominalizations in the “Methods” section was mainly the description of the state of diagnosis (no diagnosis, current diagnosis), keeping the consistency in language use.Compared with the short summary of findings and suggestions in the other “Conclusions:” sections (Example 3), the highly nominalized “Conclusions” section contained implications (the results suggest that … indexes …) and research significance (… supports a developmental perspective …) (Example 4), which contributes to a more detailed explanation of results and justifies the value of this research article, making its statements more convincing.Example 3: Treatment with MOUD was associated with a substantial reduction in suicide mortality as well as external causes of mortality and all-cause mortality.Example 4: The results suggest that while all deletion carriers exhibit decreased gamma-band response, more severe local and long-range communication abnormalities are associated with the emergence of psychotic symptoms and gray matter loss. Additionally, the lack of age-related changes in deletion carriers indexes a potential developmental impairment in circuits underlying the maturation of neural oscillations during adolescence. The progressive disruption of gamma-band response in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome supports a developmental perspective toward understanding and treating psychotic disorders (No. 9).By extracting the frequency distribution of nominalization in the different sections in Table 1 and the lexical token counts derived from the statistics in AntConc, the overall distribution of lexical tokens of nominalization in the abstracts in Table 3 was formed. As the total number of lexical tokens in the four sections differed, the frequencies of nominalization tokens from the original statistics were converted to standard frequencies, i.e., the original statistical frequencies divided by the total number of token words in each corresponding section and multiplied by 10,000, getting the number of occurrences per 10,000 words. Finally, the chi-square test for the frequency of nominalization between the four sections was carried out using SPSS 26.0. The statistical results showed a significant difference in the use of nominalization across the four sections (χ2(3) = 137.107, p < 0.01).Table 3:Nominalization tokens in the abstract.TotalObjectiveMethodsResultsConclusionTotal tokens7,8361,56220922,6881,374Noun tokens3,3406079601,143510Nominalization tokens471102107141121χ2(3) = 137.107, p = 0.000.4.2General characteristics of the distribution of nominalized suffixes in the abstractIn this study, the lexical tokens of nominalization were retrieved in the corpus by querying for nominalization suffixes, and the statistics of the frequency of different nominalization suffixes in the abstracts are shown in Table 4, as nominalizations ending in -al do not appear in the corpus used in this study, so they are not counted. As shown in Table 4, nominalization ending in -sion/-tion (process nominalization) is the most frequently used form, accounting for 52.44% of all nominalization usages, followed by nominalization ending in -ment and -ity (quality nominalization), accounting for 14.44 and 14.23% of the total nominalization uses, respectively, which is also in line with the study of Holtz (2009, 2011, in which statistical results of the analysis of nominalization suffixes in traditional-segmented abstracts were explored and the most frequently used nominalized suffixes were found to be -sion/-tion, followed by -ment and -ity.Table 4:Frequency of nominalization suffixes in the abstract.SuffixesAbstractsF%-age20.42-ance40.85-(e)ry30.64-ity6714.23-sion/tion24752.44-ment6814.44-ness132.76-sis398.28-ure81.70-th204.25Σ471100.005DiscussionThe results show that the segmented abstracts had the longest average length of the “Results” section and the highest number of nominalizations, but the “Conclusions” section had the highest frequency of nominalizations. The “Results” section assumes a descriptive function, mainly to accurately convey information and describe results, with a certain degree of abstraction, and the sentences rely more on lexical rather than referential cohesion (e.g., Outcome groups differed in neuroanatomical features … neuroanatomical differences …). The “Conclusions” part here was similar to the “Discussion” part of the main body of research articles (e.g., The results suggest that … the lack of age-related changes indexes … The progressive disruption of gamma-band response supports …). As it affords the function of condensing the preceding information, explaining the findings, and revealing the significance of the research or contribution to the field, it is the most argumentative and abstract section and thus prefers to use the theme structure to construct logic to support the arguments and persuade readers (Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Martínez, 2003). At the same time, the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of research articles plays an important role in enhancing persuasiveness (Arizavi et al., 2015), and, in a study by Gao (2012) on the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of medical articles, the author found that nominalizations facilitated logic construction and formality; therefore, the “Conclusions” section tended to use more nominalizations to develop logic in order to persuade readers of the results or significance of the study in a segmented abstract.The significant difference in the use of nominalization between different sections in the segmented abstract suggests that the segmented abstract mimics a structure similar to the body section in a dissertation, i.e., Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion (IMRD) (Swales, 1990), with the first part of the abstract being the research part of the introduction, which presents only the objective of the study. Therefore, the content of each section varies and the degree of nominalization use varies, which is also consistent with previous studies that have found different distributions of nominalization in different parts of academic articles (Arizavi et al., 2015; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017).Second, in a few abstracts with high use of nominalization, the use of nominalization ensured consistency and coherence in the use of language – as well as a full account of the context of the study and a summary and interpretation of the results – enhanced the richness of the content, and expanded the coverage. At the same time, the conciseness and accuracy of the language required more involvement of nominalization, which is also in compliance with the characteristics of abstracts found in previous studies (Bhatia, 1993; Brusaw, 1982; Corson, 1997; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019; Yue & Zhang, 2019).Statistics on the frequency of the use of nominalization suffixes indicate a greater use of -sion/-tion, -ment, and -ity as suffixes for process and quality nominalization in abstract writing, which aligns with previous research on traditional non-segmented abstracts, suggesting that the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts still follows the traditional pattern. On the one hand, process nominalization can (1) reduce the length of the text and make it more concise. For example, the nominalized expression environmental exposure is shorter than the non-nominalized version be exposed in the environment; and (2) increase the level of abstraction and make the text more technical. For example, compared with variation in clinical outcome is associated with both group- and individual-level …, the non-nominalized expression the clinical outcome varies, which is associated with both group- and individual-level … consists of two clauses (a main clause and a subordinate clause) and is less abstract. On the other hand, quality nominalization (1) helps construct coherence. For instance, Methods: The authors identified participants with fully remitted, partially remitted, and persistent ADHD at each time point … Longitudinal patterns of remission and persistence were identified that considered context and timing. Results: only 10.8% demonstrated stable ADHD persistence across study time points …. In the “Methods” section, the words “persistent” and “persistence” were mutually exclusive and avoided repetition in language use. The “persistence” in the “Results” section and the “persistence” in the “Methods” section mutually reinforced and built coherence between the sections; and (2) weakens the subjective expression and makes the text more objective. For example, in the sentence leading to increased disease susceptibility, the non-nominalized expression “susceptible” is an adjective whose meaning might be misleading to some extent that “who thinks what is susceptible” will convey the subjective view of the author or a subject, and thus reduce the level of objectivity. Thus, the segmented abstracts still show a consistent distribution and tendency in terms of lexical choice and transformation in the types of nominalization and do not show an inconsistent tendency in the functional use of nominalization.6ConclusionsTo investigate the characteristics of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts, this study adopted a corpus linguistic approach and found significant differences in the use of nominalization between the four sections within segmented abstracts, suggesting that the requirement of the segmented abstract produces distinctions in the content of the sections, which in turn affects the construction and expression in different sections; consequently, the degree of use of nominalization varies. At the same time, the structure of the segmented abstracts resembles the division of the body of research articles, tending to make the most use of nominalization in the last section for the purposes of summary, explanation and suggestion. Furthermore, in several cases where nominalizations were used more frequently, it is shown that although the requirements of the segmented abstract are clear, there is flexibility in the coverage of the content; consequently, the requirements for nominalizations also vary. In terms of the specific use of nomenclature, the use of process and quality nominalizations in segmented summaries is similar to that of traditional whole-paragraph abstracts and is resonant with the function of nominalization, which is used to condense information, build coherence and weaken subject, making the abstracts more concise, objective and information-dense.First of all, the focus on the occurrence of nominalization in segmented abstracts may raise scholars’ awareness of the important role of nominalization in academic writing, which can contribute to their learning and writing by using nominalization to create a more informative and concise work.The investigation of segmented abstracts is also meaningful for the instructors and learners in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which can assist them in having a better understanding of segmented abstracts in research articles and obtaining the writing ability, making them reap the benefits of the opportunity to publish studies in the journals that require segmented abstracts.Analysis of segmented abstracts can provide knowledge of the most frequent types of nominalization and the common suffixes of nominalization to scholars and learners, which can help them understand the process of nominalization and notice the varieties of nominalization. For example, when they want to express the meaning that consists of a process or an action (e.g., it had been exposed in the environment, so it was infected), they can transfer the dynamic process into a nominalized form by searching for its noun form (e.g., environmental exposure made it infected). The nominalization of expose to exposure shortens the expression and increases the conciseness and technicality.For ESP teachers, explicit instruction on the importance of nominalization is crucial. The teachers can first introduce the meaning of nominalization and then give some examples. After that, the teachers could turn to corpus tools to show the use of nominalizations in writing to learners. Take AntConc as an example. Since the frequently used suffixes of nominalization have been identified, after the teacher compiles all the writings intended for class, the use of nominalization in this specific corpus can be recognized through the searching of particular suffixes. Also, ESP teachers can create two corpora (a journal article corpus and a sample writing corpus) to compare if there is a lack of awareness in learners that published journals may demonstrate more use of nominalizations, which generates the visual contrast for students to see. Moreover, using corpus tools can facilitate the identification of nominalization distributed in different parts of writings. The significant distribution of nominalization in a particular part could be explained with the function of nominalizations to specify the utility of nominalization in writings. Showing the results of the distribution of nominalizations or accompanying learners to identify nominalizations in texts can contribute to both their awareness and understanding of the use of nominalizations. In this process, computer-assisted learning serves as a better way, which achieves the purpose of studying in a larger context and making parallel comparison, contributing to comprehensive learning and creating a more direct visualization.In addition to the frequency distribution of nominalization and the use of nominalization suffixes to study the characteristics of segmented abstracts, collocation before and after nominalizations and the transitivity system are also important aspects of the study of nominalization. Therefore, future research can investigate nominalization in abstracts in terms of both the modifiers that accompany nominalization and the transitivity system.This study only analysed 30 articles selected from a specific journal, which neither explored this journal deeply nor explained nominalization in segmented abstracts broadly; therefore, more journals in various disciplines and more samples can be collected in future studies to show a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts. Moreover, apart from the use and function of nominalization, other typical features in segmented abstracts could be paid attention to, for example, the role of the segmentation of abstracts in increasing legibility and transmissibility. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of China Computer-Assisted Language Learning de Gruyter

Examining the application of nominalization in segmented abstracts: a corpus-based study

Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/examining-the-application-of-nominalization-in-segmented-abstracts-a-c5wlLRlEr5
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston
eISSN
2748-3479
DOI
10.1515/jccall-2022-0026
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

1IntroductionResearch articles are an important constituent of scientific genres. Textual organization and linguistic choices are required in research articles (Lim, 2006). Analysing research articles has practical reasons that its formal style makes it distinguished from other genres, and therefore, for scholars, an academic style is conducive to obtaining international recognition from publishing papers; for learners, raising the awareness of differences of text expression and organization in discourse can facilitate the learning and understanding of academic writings (Arizavi et al., 2015).Academic writing has the feature of abstraction, objectivity, condensation, technicality, authoritativeness, high lexical density, and internal reasoning (Fang, 2005; Halliday, 1998; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Hamp-Lyons & Heasley, 2006; Hyland, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2004; Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003; Snow, 2010), which require the adoption of grammatical metaphors (GMs), particularly nominalization. From the linguistic point of view, the high frequency of nominalized structures is one of the most conspicuous features of academic science writing (Biber & Gray, 2013). Furthermore, more uses of nominalization are associated with more specialized technicality (Thompson, 2004).Abstracts, as the most concise part in research articles, consist of the most various kinds of information, including research objectives, methods, results, and even implications and suggestions. Hence, abstracts are required to be concise and informative, which calls for a large amount use of nominalizations to realize multiple functions. Although a few studies have tapped into the analysis of abstracts (Holtz, 2009, 2011; Prasithrathsint, 2014), in this study, a special type of abstract, segmented abstracts, was explored concerning the different use of nominalizations in distinct parts within the segmented abstracts.Segmented abstracts are a new format to illustrate required the information of research articles. The segmented abstract is not only a distributed writing construction for authors to demonstrate the content of research articles but also a clear reading construction for readers to seek information and know the newest research results. The position at the beginning also highlights the importance of segmented abstracts in academic articles. The exploration of nominalization in published segmented abstracts can identify the distribution and function of nominalizations. Therefore, scholars can learn about the usage of nominalizations to have a better understanding of the nominalizations in segmented abstracts and create qualified segmented abstracts.2Literature review2.1Grammatical metaphorGM is an important part of systemic functional linguistics. It refers to a non-congruent way of reconstructing language, substituting one grammatical class or structure for another, realigning the relationship between semantic meaning and grammatical structure, and expanding the meaning potential (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin & Rose, 2007).GM is believed to be the core of academic and scientific discourse (Ravelli, 2003). It has the capability to repack grammar through decoupling and recombining meanings and words of use, making the complex language into abstract entities, using the logical chain to connect these entities, and developing reasoning to support arguments through objective presentation (Halliday, 1998; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Schleppegrell, 2004; Thompson, 2004).In scientific texts, through GM, technical and scientific terms or entities can be created, and cause-and-effect relations can be established as well as the reasoning within them (Kazemian & Hashemi, 2014). More uses of GM brings along more information load and lexical density (Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003).GM is classified into ideational GM (IGM) and interpersonal GM. IGM is a metaphor realized through transitivity, permitting the variation between congruent and incongruent meanings and wordings (Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003; Thompson, 2004). It performs the functions of condensing information, compacting language, and creating scientific terms (Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013). IGM serves the functions of lexical density, objectivity, and technicality, which is consistent with the objective, abstract, and formal features of academic writing (Kazemian et al., 2013; Shahab & Asl, 2015).2.2NominalizationAccording to Halliday (1994) and Thompson (2004), nominalization is considered the most powerful tool to realize IGM, which includes processing meaning in a nominal form.Nominalization is the main lexico-grammatical feature of academic and written language (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). It has been regarded as a form to package information in an economical way, and thus it has played an important role in scientific writing (Banks, 2005; Fang et al., 2006; Halliday, 2004). The conciseness and condensation brought by nominalization allow expert readers to extract abundant information quickly and efficiently from relatively short texts (Biber & Gray, 2010). The process of nominalization acquires some qualities of entities that are compatible with scientific writing for solid, stable, and fixed quality (Banks, 2003). Furthermore, the application of nominalization in scientific writing has shown an increasing tendency (Banks, 2003; Biber et al., 1998).Using nominalization can make discourse more concise, objective, and formal (Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013). Studies have shown that native English speakers and more experienced second-language writers tend to use nominalization more in academic writing (Arizavi et al., 2015; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Sarani & Talati-Baghsiahi, 2015). In addition, the necessity of nominalization has been emphasized by Halliday and Webster (2009) because the reasoning in scientific texts is developed by interdependence between information that the previous information should be restated later, which can be achieved by nominalization.As the most common resource for establishing ideational metaphors, nominalization first occurred in scientific and technical discourse (Halliday, 1994). It can transform an action or a process into a concept and thus create abstract meaning, condense more information into nominal groups, reduce the number of clauses, and create a concise writing style, which is in harmony with science writing (Thompson, 2004). The function of nominalization mainly involves three aspects. The first is information condensation. It encapsulates meanings into nominal groups that are tightly information loaded, and thus the information volume and lexical density increase; moreover, the objective and abstract expression can be achieved (Kazemian et al., 2013; Zhang, 2018). The second aspect is discourse coherence construction. It functions as a theme to restate given information, escaping the repeated mention of the previous information, and also performs as a rheme to present new information, which is similar to scientific texts that offer new information on the basis of aforementioned arguments (Jalilifar & Shirali, 2014). This function can be applied as a cohesive device for its referential linking (Baratta, 2010; Fang et al., 2006; Zhang, 2018), and consequently, it facilitates the information flow within texts (Martin, 2008). The third is subject weakening function. It avoids the expression of agents or doers of the action (Colombi, 2006; Knowles & Moon, 2006), which removes the influence from human beings, and therefore makes texts more objective, especially in scientific writing. Apart from these three, the other functions make an action become a concept (Taverniers, 2004; Webster, 2002). The process of nominalization acquires some qualities of entities that are compatible with scientific writing for solid, stable, and fixed quality (Banks, 2003). In addition, the structure of nominalization facilitates the addition of modifying information, thus enabling the nominalized information to be more focused and serving to highlight or emphasize it (Arizavi et al., 2015).In addition, the use of nominalization varies across disciplines, despite being under the umbrella of academic writing (Holtz, 2011; Jalilifar, et al., 2014; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017). Research on nominalization has focused more on scientific texts. Starting with the historical origins of nominalization in scientific discourse by Banks (2005), the study of nominalization has involved academic texts (Arizavi et al., 2015; Baratta, 2010; Colombi, 2006; Gao, 2012; Halliday, 1993; Heidari Kaidan et al., 2021; Holtz, 2009; Jalilifar, et al., 2014, 2018; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Jalilifar, White et al., 2017; Jalilifar & Shirali, 2014; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Norouzi et al., 2012; Prasithrathsint, 2014; Saffura, 2019; Sarani & Talati-Baghsiahi, 2015; Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013), historical texts (Sušinskienė, 2009), and political and commercial texts (Hadidi & Raghami, 2012).Also, research concerning different chapters within the academic discourse has been included, such as a comparative analysis of the main body of the research article and the abstract (Holtz, 2009, 2011), a study of the use of nominalization in the abstract section (Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019), an in-depth exploration of nominalization in the discussion section (Arizavi et al., 2015), and a study of comparative use of nominalization in the introductory and methodological sections (Jalilifar et al., 2017).2.3Research questionFrom previous studies, the use of nominalization does enhance the conciseness, information capacity and formality of academic texts (Banks, 2005; Biber & Gray, 2013; Fang et al., 2006; Halliday, 2004; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Tabrizi & Nabifar, 2013; Thompson, 2004). Various sections of academic articles accordingly use nominalization to varying degrees depending on the characteristics of the content (Arizavi et al., 2015; Holtz, 2009, 2011; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019), making the use of nominalization a distinctive feature in academic articles.In research articles, the abstract section assumes an important function in that it is at the very beginning of the article and needs to have a very prominent information density. Meanwhile, the abstract is a kind of highly-condensed discourse, requiring accuracy and conciseness; because of the formality and technicality of research articles, consistency and coherence are of great importance (Brusaw, 1982; Corson, 1997). The content of the abstract needs to include the subject of the study, the research methods, the results, and the significance of the study or suggestions for future research. However, this need for high information density has to be achieved in a short space due to the word limit (Bhatia, 1993), so these features of the abstract section require a high need for nominalization to conclude and connect sentences, condense information, make the abstract more concise, and focus more attention on technical terms (Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019; Yue & Zhang, 2019). In previous studies, the abstract section covered a greater amount of information and nominalization was used more frequently in abstracts (Holtz, 2009, 2011; Mahbudi et al., 2014). Furthermore, nominalization in abstracts plays the role of not only condensing information and building discourse coherence but also making technical terms more central, reducing subjectivity, and increasing objectivity, which is an indication of professionalism (Prasithrathsint, 2014).However, in recent years, some academic journals have introduced different specifications for writing the abstract section, moving away from the one-paragraph writing of the past to segmented writing, i.e. requiring a clear division of the abstract content into paragraphs, such as dividing the abstract into sections on the objective of the study, the research methods, the results, and the conclusion. This splitting of the discourse affects the construction of content, and whether the use of nominalization in this varies according to the distinction between different paragraphs and content has not been studied. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate segmented abstracts and to further explore the characteristics of the use of nominalization in abstracts in general and the characteristics and differences among different paragraphs by counting the frequency of the use of different nominalized suffixes by using the method of corpus linguistics. The study of segmented abstracts can contribute to education and learning in English for Specific Purposes (ESP).The research questions are as follows:RQ1:What are the distributional features of nominalizations in different parts of segmented abstracts?RQ2:What are the general characteristics of the nominalizations in segmented abstracts?3Materials and methodsThe research method of corpus linguistics was adopted. A total of 30 recently published abstracts with segmented features from the American Journal of Psychiatry were used to compile the corpus in this study. The American Journal of Psychiatry is the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, the third most widely read and cited psychiatric journal in the field of psychiatry (impact factor 19.242 in 2021) and the most widely read and cited psychiatric journal worldwide (48,015 total citations in 2021). The 30 abstracts were drawn from 7 issues of the American Journal of Psychiatry between 2021 and 2022 (from volume 178, issue 11 to volume 179, issue 5), covering topics including autism, depression, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 7,836 lexical tokens were included in the 30 abstracts.This study used TagAnt to annotate all the lexical tokens that appeared in the abstracts and employed AntConc for subsequent screening using nominalization suffixes. Then, extracting nominalization from the lexical tokens was supplemented by manual secondary annotation. The criterion for nominalization is the transformation of an action or a process into a concept. According to previous studies (Biber, 1988; Holtz, 2009; Jalilifar et al., 2018), nominalization suffixes can be divided into (1) transformations from verbs to nouns (process nominalization), such as develop to development, with query suffixes such as -age (dose to dosage), -al (propose to proposal), -(e)ry (recover to recovery), -sion/-tion (conclude to conclusion), -ment (develop to development), -sis (analyse to analysis), -ure (fail to failure) and -th (grow to growth) and their corresponding plural forms; and (2) conversions from adjectives to nouns (quality nominalization), such as heritable to heritability, with query suffixes such as -ity (dense to density), -ness (thick to thickness), and -ance (important to importance) and their corresponding plural forms. The use of nominalization from nouns is not common in academic discourse, so this study only considers the phenomenon of nominalization from verbs and adjectives (Conrad & Biber, 2001). Furthermore, due to the concentration of the topics in this journal, “depression” and lexical markers in proper nouns (e.g., The Prescription Drug Abuse System) were not taken into account in the analysis of nominalization.4Results4.1Distribution of nominalizations in different paragraphsThe distribution frequency of nominalization in the four paragraphs of each abstract (objective, methods, results, and conclusions) is shown in Table 1. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of nominalization in the overall distribution and in the paragraph distribution. As shown in Table 1, the “Results” section has the most occurrence of nominalizations, with 141 in total. On average, there are 4.7 nominalizations per abstract in the “Results” section. However, in terms of the overall length of the abstract section, the use of nominalization in the “Results” section accounts for 5.25% of the whole section, while the nominalization tokens take 8.80% of the “Conclusions” section. Hence, the “Conclusions” section uses nominalizations most frequently.Table 1:Nominalization across four paragraphs.No.ObjectiveMethodsResultsConclusionsFrequency%Frequency%Frequency%Frequency%132.9421.8732.1343.31221.9621.8710.7154.13300.0010.9300.0010.83465.8810.9364.2675.79532.9400.0042.8421.65643.9254.6796.3821.65776.8698.4164.2664.96810.9821.8742.8464.96954.9065.6185.67108.261054.9010.9353.5554.131110.9821.8753.5521.651221.9643.7474.9632.481310.9832.8042.8432.481410.9854.6721.4243.31151211.7621.8774.9664.961676.8665.6164.2654.131743.9265.6153.5543.311800.0032.8000.0032.481910.9832.8010.7121.652032.9421.8732.1354.13211110.7810.9353.5532.482221.9654.6742.8432.482300.0054.6764.2610.832443.9221.8796.3843.312521.9621.8742.8410.832654.901110.2832.1364.962732.9410.9353.5532.482810.9854.6785.6775.792910.9843.7496.3854.133054.9065.6121.4232.48Σ 102100107100141100121100Table 2:Results of descriptive statistics on the use of nominalization in the overall and paragraph distributions.MeanSD%Abstract15.72.5806.01Objective3.42.9906.53Methods3.62.5285.11Results4.72.5755.25Conclusions4.02.0768.80It is noticeable that a few articles had a significantly higher percentage of nominalizations (11.76, 10.78, 10.28, and 8.26%) than the others. Higher frequencies were found in the “Objective” section (11.76 and 10.78%), the “Methods” section (10.28%), and the “Conclusions” section (8.26%). The “Objective” section in Example 1 added more background to the study, rather than a single statement of study purpose in Example 2. Compared with Example 2, the authors of Example 1 provided background knowledge concerning the current situation, development, and problems before stating the research purpose, making the research objective more reasonable. Instead, the author in Example 2 directly delivered the research objective.Example 1: Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and half of patients with depression have treatment-resistant depression. Intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression but is limited by suboptimal efficacy and a 6-week duration … Here, the authors report the results of a sham-controlled double-blind trial of SNT for treatment-resistant depression (No. 15).Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), a 10-item screen for alcohol use disorder (AUD), have elucidated novel loci for alcohol consumption and misuse. However, these studies also revealed that GWASs can be influenced by numerous biases (e.g., measurement error, selection bias) … The authors used genomic structural equation modeling to elucidate the genetics of alcohol consumption and problematic consequences of alcohol use as measured by AUDIT (No. 21).Example 2: The authors examined directly whether county-level changes in opioid dispensing rates affect individual-level prescription opioid misuse, frequency of use, and dependence, as well as the same outcomes for heroin.Of these, the use of nominalizations in the “Methods” section was mainly the description of the state of diagnosis (no diagnosis, current diagnosis), keeping the consistency in language use.Compared with the short summary of findings and suggestions in the other “Conclusions:” sections (Example 3), the highly nominalized “Conclusions” section contained implications (the results suggest that … indexes …) and research significance (… supports a developmental perspective …) (Example 4), which contributes to a more detailed explanation of results and justifies the value of this research article, making its statements more convincing.Example 3: Treatment with MOUD was associated with a substantial reduction in suicide mortality as well as external causes of mortality and all-cause mortality.Example 4: The results suggest that while all deletion carriers exhibit decreased gamma-band response, more severe local and long-range communication abnormalities are associated with the emergence of psychotic symptoms and gray matter loss. Additionally, the lack of age-related changes in deletion carriers indexes a potential developmental impairment in circuits underlying the maturation of neural oscillations during adolescence. The progressive disruption of gamma-band response in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome supports a developmental perspective toward understanding and treating psychotic disorders (No. 9).By extracting the frequency distribution of nominalization in the different sections in Table 1 and the lexical token counts derived from the statistics in AntConc, the overall distribution of lexical tokens of nominalization in the abstracts in Table 3 was formed. As the total number of lexical tokens in the four sections differed, the frequencies of nominalization tokens from the original statistics were converted to standard frequencies, i.e., the original statistical frequencies divided by the total number of token words in each corresponding section and multiplied by 10,000, getting the number of occurrences per 10,000 words. Finally, the chi-square test for the frequency of nominalization between the four sections was carried out using SPSS 26.0. The statistical results showed a significant difference in the use of nominalization across the four sections (χ2(3) = 137.107, p < 0.01).Table 3:Nominalization tokens in the abstract.TotalObjectiveMethodsResultsConclusionTotal tokens7,8361,56220922,6881,374Noun tokens3,3406079601,143510Nominalization tokens471102107141121χ2(3) = 137.107, p = 0.000.4.2General characteristics of the distribution of nominalized suffixes in the abstractIn this study, the lexical tokens of nominalization were retrieved in the corpus by querying for nominalization suffixes, and the statistics of the frequency of different nominalization suffixes in the abstracts are shown in Table 4, as nominalizations ending in -al do not appear in the corpus used in this study, so they are not counted. As shown in Table 4, nominalization ending in -sion/-tion (process nominalization) is the most frequently used form, accounting for 52.44% of all nominalization usages, followed by nominalization ending in -ment and -ity (quality nominalization), accounting for 14.44 and 14.23% of the total nominalization uses, respectively, which is also in line with the study of Holtz (2009, 2011, in which statistical results of the analysis of nominalization suffixes in traditional-segmented abstracts were explored and the most frequently used nominalized suffixes were found to be -sion/-tion, followed by -ment and -ity.Table 4:Frequency of nominalization suffixes in the abstract.SuffixesAbstractsF%-age20.42-ance40.85-(e)ry30.64-ity6714.23-sion/tion24752.44-ment6814.44-ness132.76-sis398.28-ure81.70-th204.25Σ471100.005DiscussionThe results show that the segmented abstracts had the longest average length of the “Results” section and the highest number of nominalizations, but the “Conclusions” section had the highest frequency of nominalizations. The “Results” section assumes a descriptive function, mainly to accurately convey information and describe results, with a certain degree of abstraction, and the sentences rely more on lexical rather than referential cohesion (e.g., Outcome groups differed in neuroanatomical features … neuroanatomical differences …). The “Conclusions” part here was similar to the “Discussion” part of the main body of research articles (e.g., The results suggest that … the lack of age-related changes indexes … The progressive disruption of gamma-band response supports …). As it affords the function of condensing the preceding information, explaining the findings, and revealing the significance of the research or contribution to the field, it is the most argumentative and abstract section and thus prefers to use the theme structure to construct logic to support the arguments and persuade readers (Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Martínez, 2003). At the same time, the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of research articles plays an important role in enhancing persuasiveness (Arizavi et al., 2015), and, in a study by Gao (2012) on the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of medical articles, the author found that nominalizations facilitated logic construction and formality; therefore, the “Conclusions” section tended to use more nominalizations to develop logic in order to persuade readers of the results or significance of the study in a segmented abstract.The significant difference in the use of nominalization between different sections in the segmented abstract suggests that the segmented abstract mimics a structure similar to the body section in a dissertation, i.e., Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion (IMRD) (Swales, 1990), with the first part of the abstract being the research part of the introduction, which presents only the objective of the study. Therefore, the content of each section varies and the degree of nominalization use varies, which is also consistent with previous studies that have found different distributions of nominalization in different parts of academic articles (Arizavi et al., 2015; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017).Second, in a few abstracts with high use of nominalization, the use of nominalization ensured consistency and coherence in the use of language – as well as a full account of the context of the study and a summary and interpretation of the results – enhanced the richness of the content, and expanded the coverage. At the same time, the conciseness and accuracy of the language required more involvement of nominalization, which is also in compliance with the characteristics of abstracts found in previous studies (Bhatia, 1993; Brusaw, 1982; Corson, 1997; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019; Yue & Zhang, 2019).Statistics on the frequency of the use of nominalization suffixes indicate a greater use of -sion/-tion, -ment, and -ity as suffixes for process and quality nominalization in abstract writing, which aligns with previous research on traditional non-segmented abstracts, suggesting that the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts still follows the traditional pattern. On the one hand, process nominalization can (1) reduce the length of the text and make it more concise. For example, the nominalized expression environmental exposure is shorter than the non-nominalized version be exposed in the environment; and (2) increase the level of abstraction and make the text more technical. For example, compared with variation in clinical outcome is associated with both group- and individual-level …, the non-nominalized expression the clinical outcome varies, which is associated with both group- and individual-level … consists of two clauses (a main clause and a subordinate clause) and is less abstract. On the other hand, quality nominalization (1) helps construct coherence. For instance, Methods: The authors identified participants with fully remitted, partially remitted, and persistent ADHD at each time point … Longitudinal patterns of remission and persistence were identified that considered context and timing. Results: only 10.8% demonstrated stable ADHD persistence across study time points …. In the “Methods” section, the words “persistent” and “persistence” were mutually exclusive and avoided repetition in language use. The “persistence” in the “Results” section and the “persistence” in the “Methods” section mutually reinforced and built coherence between the sections; and (2) weakens the subjective expression and makes the text more objective. For example, in the sentence leading to increased disease susceptibility, the non-nominalized expression “susceptible” is an adjective whose meaning might be misleading to some extent that “who thinks what is susceptible” will convey the subjective view of the author or a subject, and thus reduce the level of objectivity. Thus, the segmented abstracts still show a consistent distribution and tendency in terms of lexical choice and transformation in the types of nominalization and do not show an inconsistent tendency in the functional use of nominalization.6ConclusionsTo investigate the characteristics of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts, this study adopted a corpus linguistic approach and found significant differences in the use of nominalization between the four sections within segmented abstracts, suggesting that the requirement of the segmented abstract produces distinctions in the content of the sections, which in turn affects the construction and expression in different sections; consequently, the degree of use of nominalization varies. At the same time, the structure of the segmented abstracts resembles the division of the body of research articles, tending to make the most use of nominalization in the last section for the purposes of summary, explanation and suggestion. Furthermore, in several cases where nominalizations were used more frequently, it is shown that although the requirements of the segmented abstract are clear, there is flexibility in the coverage of the content; consequently, the requirements for nominalizations also vary. In terms of the specific use of nomenclature, the use of process and quality nominalizations in segmented summaries is similar to that of traditional whole-paragraph abstracts and is resonant with the function of nominalization, which is used to condense information, build coherence and weaken subject, making the abstracts more concise, objective and information-dense.First of all, the focus on the occurrence of nominalization in segmented abstracts may raise scholars’ awareness of the important role of nominalization in academic writing, which can contribute to their learning and writing by using nominalization to create a more informative and concise work.The investigation of segmented abstracts is also meaningful for the instructors and learners in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which can assist them in having a better understanding of segmented abstracts in research articles and obtaining the writing ability, making them reap the benefits of the opportunity to publish studies in the journals that require segmented abstracts.Analysis of segmented abstracts can provide knowledge of the most frequent types of nominalization and the common suffixes of nominalization to scholars and learners, which can help them understand the process of nominalization and notice the varieties of nominalization. For example, when they want to express the meaning that consists of a process or an action (e.g., it had been exposed in the environment, so it was infected), they can transfer the dynamic process into a nominalized form by searching for its noun form (e.g., environmental exposure made it infected). The nominalization of expose to exposure shortens the expression and increases the conciseness and technicality.For ESP teachers, explicit instruction on the importance of nominalization is crucial. The teachers can first introduce the meaning of nominalization and then give some examples. After that, the teachers could turn to corpus tools to show the use of nominalizations in writing to learners. Take AntConc as an example. Since the frequently used suffixes of nominalization have been identified, after the teacher compiles all the writings intended for class, the use of nominalization in this specific corpus can be recognized through the searching of particular suffixes. Also, ESP teachers can create two corpora (a journal article corpus and a sample writing corpus) to compare if there is a lack of awareness in learners that published journals may demonstrate more use of nominalizations, which generates the visual contrast for students to see. Moreover, using corpus tools can facilitate the identification of nominalization distributed in different parts of writings. The significant distribution of nominalization in a particular part could be explained with the function of nominalizations to specify the utility of nominalization in writings. Showing the results of the distribution of nominalizations or accompanying learners to identify nominalizations in texts can contribute to both their awareness and understanding of the use of nominalizations. In this process, computer-assisted learning serves as a better way, which achieves the purpose of studying in a larger context and making parallel comparison, contributing to comprehensive learning and creating a more direct visualization.In addition to the frequency distribution of nominalization and the use of nominalization suffixes to study the characteristics of segmented abstracts, collocation before and after nominalizations and the transitivity system are also important aspects of the study of nominalization. Therefore, future research can investigate nominalization in abstracts in terms of both the modifiers that accompany nominalization and the transitivity system.This study only analysed 30 articles selected from a specific journal, which neither explored this journal deeply nor explained nominalization in segmented abstracts broadly; therefore, more journals in various disciplines and more samples can be collected in future studies to show a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts. Moreover, apart from the use and function of nominalization, other typical features in segmented abstracts could be paid attention to, for example, the role of the segmentation of abstracts in increasing legibility and transmissibility.

Journal

Journal of China Computer-Assisted Language Learning – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 1, 2022

Keywords: corpus-based analysis; ESP; grammatical metaphor; nominalization; research articles; segmented abstracts; systemic functional linguistics

There are no references for this article.