A comparative study of nominalization across three disciplines

Abstract

The main objectives of the present study are to examine and compare the nominalization deployment across three key academic disciplines: sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The analysis hinged on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theoretical framework. Fifteen academic articles were sampled and analyzed regarding occurrence, type, pattern, and function of nominalization. A quantitative analysis was done to provide numerical data for the occurrence, type, pattern, and function. A qualitative analysis was employed to describe the function of nominalization in the academic articles. From 3,259 sentences, 1,321 sentences were found with nominalization. The highest frequent use of nominalization was found in sciences, followed by social sciences, and humanities. All these disciplines demonstrated the preference for the use of verbal nominalization. In addition, no significant difference was found in terms of pattern as they shared the top three similar prevalent patterns i.e., deictic + nominalization, classifier + nominalization, and nominalization. Regarding the function, it was found that nominalization was used for creating textual cohesion, enhancing objectivity, and packing information. By knowing this, it elucidates better understanding of nominalization deployment in different disciplines and can be adapted for lesson planning in English academic writing courses.