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Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussion

4.1 General Data Description
It is about the frequency of nominalization of each file used by three groups. Foreach group, we combine all the files into one and re-divide it into 17 files (or text files)with each file having 1000 words. Putting these files into Antconc 3.2.4 one by one,here comes the frequency in the use of nominalization with suffixes within 1000 wordseach. (see Table 4-2) We put the frequency of verb-based nominalization, that ofadjective-based nominalization and the selected zero suffixation nominalizationstogether to give an overall picture about the use of nominalization by three groups. N, in Chart 4-3 refers to the number of files of each group and Mean refers to theaverage frequency of nominalizations in each group. The table tells us the sameconclusion that the general frequency of nominalization of native speakers is the least,with English majors in the middle and non-English group the most.Though the total number and the average number of nominalization is told from thelast two tables, whether there are significant differences among these groups cannot betold by only judging these numbers. Therefore, it is necessary for us to runIndependence Samples Test to find out whether the significant differences exist. We aregoing to run the test between every two groups. First is the test of native speakers andthe English majors, followed by that of the native speaker against the non-Englishmajors and the last one is the test between two Chinese learners groups.The following Table 4-4 is a condensed form of the result of the IndependentSamples Test for the first two groups.

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Conclusion

From the research, we have the following two findings. First, the frequency ofnominalization does not necessarily have a positive correlation with the Englishproficiency of subjects, which is the conclusion of most of the previous studies. In ourstudy, the native speakers use nominalizations the least, followed by the English majors,and the non-English majors the most. The second finding is about learners’ acquisitionof semantic meaning of nominalization, which is seldom explored in the previousstudies. Making the native speakers’ use grammatical and semantic constituents as acriteria, Chinese learners tend to overlook the verb semantic meaning of nominalizationwhich is represented by the fact that the native speakers use the meaning of verb theleast, while non-English majors use it the most, followed by the English majors.Between the two groups of Chinese learners, non-English majors’ acquisition of thediscourse function of nominalization is not as good as the English majors which isrepresented by the fact that they tend to use more consecutive nominalizations. These allindicate the overuse of nominalization or even the failure of acquiring nominalization.
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Reference (omitted)