Nominalization as Rhetorical Organization: A Discipline-specific Study of Academic Discourse
The present study sets out to investigate the roles of nominalization in academic writing.
Previous studies on the use of nominalization in academic writing have observed three main
pragmatic purposes of the device: cognitive, textual, and interactional. Specifically, nominalized
forms package higher information content, maintain cohesion in texts, and convey an impersonaltone. While nominalization has attracted much interest concerning its functions in academic
discourse (e.g. Baratta, 2010; Biber, 1988; Charles, 2003; Francis, 1994; Gao, 2008; Guillen Galve,1998; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Hartnett, 2004; Hyland, 2006.), little research has been dedicatedto the usage of nominalization with respect to different moves and steps in distinct sections ofjournal articles. To fill this gap, we mainly followed the IMRD model of the abstract section in
Swales (1990), and built a corpus composed of abstracts in New England Journal of Medicine
during the year of 2010, totaling 52 abstracts, for quantitative and qualitative analyses.
Given that academic writers tend to choose the nominal forms of verbs that treat processes andevents as abstract entities, this study zooms in on a specific subtype of lexical nominalization:
eventive nouns derived from verbs. Based on Allerton (2002) and Plag (2003), five derivationalsuffixes particular to deverbalized nouns with an eventive meaning were selected for analyses: –age(e.g. coverage), -al (e.g. survival), -ance/-ence (e.g. occurrence), -ion (-ation/-ition/-ution/-tion) (e.g.
stimulation), -ment (e.g. treatment). A frequency count of the occurrences of eventive nouns withthe above suffixes in different moves was conducted, accompanied with manual checks to screen
out improper data (e.g. segment and condition). The results of our pilot study indicate that eventivenominalizations are used more frequently in the moves of INTRODUCTION/PROBLEM
STATEMENT and DISCUSSION/CONCUSSION/RECOMMENDATION than in those ofMETHOD/APPROACH and RESULTS. The findings shall not only illuminate thediscipline-specific linguistic features regarding rhetorical organization in journal articles but also
have pedagogical implications for academic English instruction.

References
Allerton, D.J., 2002. Streched Verb Constructions in English. New York: Routledge.
Baratta, M. Alexander, 2010. Nominalization development across an undergraduate academic
degree program. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (4), 1017-1036.
Biber, Douglas, 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Charles, Maggie, 2003. A corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses fromtwo contrasting disciplines. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2 (4), 313-326.
Francis, G., 1994. Labelling discourse: an aspect of nominal-group lexical cohesion. In M.
Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge, 83-101.
Gao, Wenyan, 2008. Infromation packaging in English Medical papers published in a Chinese
journal. CELEA Journal 31 (3), 42-47.
Guillen Galve, Ignacio, 1998. The textual interplay of grammatical metaphor on the nominalization
occurring in written medical English. Journal of Pragmatics 30 (3), 363-385.
Halliday, M.A.K. and J.R. Martin, 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London:
The Falmer Press.
Hartnett, Crolyn G, 2004. What should we teach about the paradoxes of English nominalization? InFoley (Eds.) Language, Education and Discourse: Functional Approaches. New York:Continuum, 174-190.
Hyland, K, 2006. Disciplinary differences: language variation in academic discourses. In K. Hyland& M. Bondi (Eds.) Academic Discourse Across Disciplines. Frankfort: Peter Lang, 17-45.
Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-Formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales J., 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.