nominalization

plural nominalizations · alternative nominalisation

1. BritishEnglishOxfordUScountablehuman sciencesA noun derived from an adjective, verb, etc., often (in English) by adding a suffix such as -ity, -tion or -ism.

   Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.

   2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in NY Times

   1 more example

   All words have argument structures. The argument structure of many nouns—such as names—is empty: We don’t need other words to complete them. But singular count nouns need a determiner to the left. And nominalizations of verbs have argument structures to follow. For example, a noun like destruction has a similar argument structure as its corresponding verb destroy: […]

   2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 77

2. BritishEnglishOxfordUSuncountablehuman sciencesThe act or process of nominalizing; the use of such a noun.

   Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity.

   2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 5

   2 more examples

   The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF)[…]

   2014 February 9, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 722

   Nominalization and agentless passives have attracted sustained attention in critical linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), where, it is argued, they ‘mystify’, i.e., reduce reader comprehension of, the role of social actors in depictions of events, particularly in news media discourse.

   2017 April 28, William Alan Lingle, Nominalizations, Agentless Passives, and Social Actor Mystification: Newspaper Editorials on the Greek Financial Crisis