Nominalization

Definition

Nominalization is the process of turning another word class (a verb or adjective, for example) into a noun. This has the effect of “packing” information into a noun, which can then be used in future sentences. For example, once we know that the process of turning liquid water into water vapor is evaporation, we can then talk about places where evaporation occurs without repeating the definition each time. We can also talk about an incidence (rather than a thing that happened), a practice (rather than a thing that we do), or tolerance (rather than being tolerant).

Nominalizations aren’t the most obvious way to express the idea – actions are usually expressed by verbs, so making them into a noun means turning a process into a thing. In functional linguistics, this is the difference between a “congruent” (i.e., everyday) use and a “non-congruent,” or metaphorical use. For this reason, nominalization is often found in more academic registers and technical writing. For example, “rain falls from the sky” is a congruent process using the verb fall, but precipitation makes it a thing, and is non-congruent because the action of rain falling has been turned into a thing.

Form

Most nominalizations are formed using a suffix such as -(a)tion, –ment, –ship, -ity, –ence, or -ance. Other nouns have the same form as the verb. For example:

As you can see from the table, nominalizations aren’t just formed by turning verbs into nouns. They can also be formed from entire clauses (e.g. “you can divide by” becomes divisibility). In fact, one characteristic of academic and technical language is the heavier use of nouns and prepositional phrases rather than verbs and clauses. In the example below, the “everyday” text is a quotation by one of the researchers who wrote the academic article on the right.

Notice how the main ideas in the everyday text are expressed as processes (verbs): people, ideas, and diseases spread; the data will revolutionize our understanding; the insights can be used to better understand the problems that we face today. However, in the abstract of the scientific paper itself, the research is described as transformative (an adjective that captures the process of revolutionizing understanding); the movement of people becomes mobility; ideas spreading are conductivity, and “how infectious diseases spread” becomes disease transmission. The research has implications for studies of the millennia-long development of terrestrial mobility – a collection of nouns, adjectives, and prepositional phrases that describe the process by which human societies developed the ability to spread around the world. In fact, that entire long sentence has only two verbs (is, shaped).

Function

Nominalizations have the effect of “packing” verbs and clauses into noun groups. This makes them very useful for definitions (evaporation, multiplication, etc.) because now we can just use one word to describe an entire process. Nominalizations can be also be a kind of reference device because they can refer back to a whole idea with a single word. For example:

Water vapor condenses into water droplets to form clouds or to form dew on the ground. Condensation happens when there is more water vapor than the air can hold at the current temperature. (condensation = water vapor condenses into water droplets)

In this way, actions, processes, and relationships (congruently expressed as verbs and clauses) are turned into things (metaphorically expressed as nouns or expanded noun groups), which can then become participants in future sentences. This makes for efficient writing (imagine rewriting the second sentence above without using the word condensation!) but also requires the reader to recognize how information has been “packed” into the nominalized phrases.