Nominalization in College English Writing

Nominalization is a very universal phenomenon in English written language as well as other languages. It has compact relations with written texts that it becomes one of important components in the formal style writing such as technical writing or legal writing. However, this does not mean that we should use as many nominalizations as possible in formal written texts. Overuse of nominalization is certain to produce some problems. The paper studies nominalization based on the framework of functional grammar, which considers nominalization as a tool for ideational metaphor that belongs to grammatical metaphor. In order to find how to use nominalizations correctly and what is the difference between nominalization usage by foreign language learners and native speakers, two corpora samples are chosen to carry out the quantitative research and analysis :The thesis of Chinese MA candidates majoring in English linguistics who represent advanced foreign language learners, and the thesis of English speaking linguists who represent English native speakers. By the research and analysis, it can be concluded that when native speakers use nominalization, the proportion is more than foreign language learners. But it is not so absolute because different authors’ writing topics and styles are different. In addition, the usage of nominalizations in written discourse especially in scientific discourse by Chinese learners should be raised.