Nominalization

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In linguistics, nominalization refers to the use of a verb or an adjective as a noun, with or without morphological transformation, so that the word can now act as the head of a noun phrase.

Nominalization happens in languages around the world. Some languages allow verbs to be used as nouns, while others require some form of morphological transformation. English has cases of both.

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[edit] Nominalization in various languages

[edit] English

[edit] Grammatical nominalization

This is process by which a grammatical expression is turned into a nominal group, also known more loosely as a noun phrase. An example is the change from "The experiment involved combining the two chemicals" to "The experiment involved the combining of the two chemicals".

[edit] Lexical nominalization

Some verbs and adjectives can be used directly as nouns, for example, change and good. Others require a suffix:

  • applicability (from applicable)
  • carelessness (from careless)
  • difficulty (from difficult)
  • failure (from fail)
  • intensity (from intense)
  • investigation (from investigate)
  • movement (from move)
  • reaction (from react)
  • refusal (from refuse)
  • swimming (from swim)
  • nominalization (from nominalize)

In prescriptivist stylistics, nominalizations are considered to make sentences more difficult to follow and to promote wordiness. For these reasons, nominalizations are usually discouraged in writing. However, they can be warranted when it is necessary to use the nominalized verb or adjective as the head of a noun phrase. Very common nominalizations (like the noun "changes") are usually not discouraged.

[edit] Other Indo-European languages

Many Indo-European languages have separate inflectional morphology for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but often this is no impediment to nominalization, as the root or stem of the adjective is readily stripped of its adjectival inflections and bedecked with nominal inflections—sometimes even with dedicated nominalizing suffixes. For example, Latin has a number of nominalization suffixes, and some of these suffixes have been borrowed into English, either directly or through Romance languages. Other examples can be seen in German—such as the subtle inflectional differences between deutsch (adj) and Deutsch (noun) across genders, numbers, and cases—although in cases of ancient roots, it may be moot to wonder which lexical category came first. Spanish, whose o/os/a/as inflections commonly mark both adjectives and nouns, shows a very permeable boundary as many roots straddle the lexical categories of adjective and noun (with little or no inflectional difference).

[edit] Chinese

In all of the Chinese languages, particles are used to nominalize verbs and adjectives. In Mandarin, the most common is 的 de, which is attached to both verbs and adjectives. For example, 吃 chī (to eat) becomes 吃的 chīde (that which is eaten). Cantonese uses 嘅 ge in the same capacity, while Minnan uses ê.

Two other particles, found throughout the Chinese languages, are used to explicitly indicate the nominalized noun as being either the agent or patient of the verb being nominalzed. 所 (suǒ in Mandarin) is attached before the verb to indicate patient, e.g. 食 (to eat) becomes 所食 (that which is eaten), and 者 (zhě in Mandarin) are attached after the verb to indicate agent, e.g. 食 (to eat) becomes 食者 (he who eats). Both particles date from Classical Chinese and retain limited productivity in modern Chinese languages.

[edit] Japanese

Japanese makes use of several particles, such as の no, もの mono and こと koto, for nominalization.