Nominalisation
I think I can confidently say, and people in the field would agree, that academic texts are formal, impersonal and lexically dense. A significant part of the lexical density comes from the fact that academic writing contains many noun phrases and these nouns phrases are often quite long. The frequency of noun phrases in academic writing relates to nominalisation. This is the use of nouns/noun phrases rather than verbs and adjective word form in writing.
For example, instead of writing, “We experimented using a wide range of equipment”, we can change it to, “The experiment used a wide range of equipment.” Doing this makes it more direct and also less personal.
Here’s another one:
- If women consume alcohol in pregnancy, this can lead to birth defects.
- The consumption of alcohol in pregnancy can lead to birth defects.
Here the noun phrase (consumption of alcohol) allows academic writers to include information in an objective, focused and efficient way.
Noun Phrases
In nominalisation, a noun phrase (NP) can be short and easy to understand, such as, “The company is successful.” However, most sentences have more than one noun phrase : “This means that there are no answers and the solutions can be seen for what they are: appeals“.
The problems is that many nominalised sentences do not consist of such simple NPs (no answers, the solutions, appeals), as this is not very informative. Therefore, the head noun (HN) in an NP is usually modified in some way :
This means that there are no easy answers to strategic problems and the solutions offered by business gurus can be seen for what they are: popular appeals to intuition which are largely devoid of any conceptual or empirical basis.
This sentence contains three NPs: no easy answers to strategic problems; the solutions offered by business gurus; popular appeals to intuition which are largely devoid of any conceptual or empirical basis.
In this nominalisation example, the completed sentence gives us far more information and this kind of modification of NPs is a common feature of academic writing. This modification is done by adding information before the noun (pre-modification) and/or after the noun (post-modification). An English noun phrase typically includes a determiner (e.g. the, some, much); a pre-modifier (e.g. adjectives, adverbs), a head noun (the main noun used); and post-modifier (e.g. a prepositional phrase, a relative clause). Note that not all those elements need to be included in a noun phrase.
Nouns and Adjectives
One of the most common ways to modify nouns in nominalisation, is with adjectives and these can come in a variety of forms. Pre-modifying nouns with compound adjectives (a small-scale study), adverb-adjective combinations (purely linguistic choices), and coordinated adjectives (Smith’s formal and narrow example is….) are all effective ways of conveying information economically. Compare:
>The offices benefit from a recently-installed IT system. >The offices benefit from an IT system which was recently installed.
Nominalisation Practice
Read this text and underline the noun phrases, noting the different types of pre- and post-modification:
The suburban housing boom certainly performed a valuable service for many millions of Americans – in particular, those marrying and founding families, who made up record totals in the 1950s. Such people – ranging from highly paid managerial and professional groups, through the range of white-collar clerical workers, to the more skilled factory workers – enjoyed solid benefits from life in suburbia. Whatever popular sociology might say by way of criticism: good, well-built houses in pleasant neighbourhoods with congenial neighbours, good schools and convenient services.
Also, the highly dispersed decision-making structure that guided the whole process did avoid massive social errors; like democracy in policies, it may have avoided spectacular success, but it equally avoided spectacular failure. Finally, with constantly rising prices, suburban housebuyers found that their purchase was a useful hedge against inflation, especially when prices rose sharply as in the mid-1970s.
Nominalisation Answers
The suburban housing boom certainly performed a valuable service for many millions of Americans – in particular, those marrying and founding families, who made up record totals in the 1950s. Such people – ranging from highly paid managerial and professional groups, through the range of white-collar clerical workers, to the more skilled factory workers – enjoyed solid benefits from life in suburbia. Whatever popular sociology might say by way of criticism: good, well-built houses in pleasant neighbourhoods with congenial neighbours, good schools and convenient services.
Also the highly dispersed decision-making structure that guided the whole process did avoid massive social errors; like democracy in policies, it may have avoided spectacular success, but it equally avoided spectacular failure. Finally, with constantly rising prices, suburban housebuyers found that their purchase was a useful hedge against inflation, especially when prices rose sharply as in the mid-1970s.