The Nominalization Patterns in Academic Writing in Contemporary English

Abstract

Nominalization is the process by which a noun is created from another word class (usually an adjective or verb) in order to express actions, procedures, or attributes as entities. In this respect, it is commonly considered to be one of the characteristic grammatical aspects of academic writing, which also adds to the abstraction, the concentration of information, and the rhetorical structure. This paper provides an inquiry into structural and functional patterns of nominalization in modern academic English and the manner in which nominalized structures are activated in different fields. The study takes the qualitative-quantitative descriptive analytical design to investigate the grammatical and discourse resource used during the authentic academic text nominalization. The sample of the data will be comprised of 15 full-length research articles published in the period 2020-2025, selected equally by linguistics, social sciences, and natural sciences. One thousand and eighty nominalized structures were found and studied on the morphological, syntactic, and discourse-functional levels. Based on the principles of the Systemic Functional Linguistics, nominalizations were categorized based on the morphological type, structural realization, syntactic position, and rhetorical role. The results show that the most common type of nominalizations are deverbal nominalizations (58%), then there are deadjectival nominalizations (24%), and clausal or abstract nominalizations (18%).. The research finds that nominalization is a multitasking grammatical tool that is conditioned by both the disciplinary requirements and rhetorical needs.