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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Rationale
English nominalization is a transformation of a verb or an adjective into a noun, forthe discourse function of formalizing the text. Broadly speaking, nominalization is aprocess by which a proposition (i.e. a congruent structure) is endowed with the functionof a noun. It generally invoked an impression of Abstraction in texts: they help us tocreate more distance between the event and the participants by removing the agents ofthe actions (Solveigas, 2009). Most of the previous studies devote to the frequency ofnominalization, while few of them on the meaning acquisition. The research of itsacquisition still needs improvement. Hence, this thesis is going to investigate what it islike in Chinese English learners’ acquisition of nominalization from the perspective ofdecategorization.Nominalization has attracted linguists’ great interest since a century ago andreached its peak in the 1960s when Systemic-Functional Linguistics predominates thefield of linguistics and still remains the center of discussion now.Despite vigorous studies on nominalizations by different linguistic approaches,including Transformation-Generative approach (known as TG approach),Systematic-Functional approach and Cognitive approach, only 5.5% of them are aboutits acquisition, which leaves room for a more in-depth investigation (Wang Lifei &Chen Gong, 2008). Enlightened by the peculiar insights in current Cognitive Linguistics(short as CL), the thesis focuses on the effects of decategorization on learners’ meaningacquisition of nominalizations.
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1.2 Research Objectives
The thesis is based on three corpora of selected abstracts drawn from the nativespeakers, the Chinese English majors and the non-English majors respectively. Thecorpus of native speakers is the thesis abstracts of different genres of scientificdiscourse – linguistics, language acquisition, biology and physics. The two corpora ofChinese English learners contain 100 English abstracts all together. These abstracts arecollected from different universities and can be grouped as that of English majors’ andnon-English majors’. The frequency of nominalization used by groups as well as, to digdeeper, how they use each grammatical and semantic constituent will be observed. Thethesis will mainly achieve the following goals:First, the thesis will find out the frequency of nominalization by these subjects ingeneral. After that, a comparison among three groups is made.Second, the thesis is going to find out how subjects use each grammatical andsemantic constituent (how to infer learners’ semantic acquisition of nominalizationthrough the observation of grammatical and semantic constituents will be elaborated inChapter Three). The percentage of each constituent will be presented for furtherdiscussion.Third, the thesis will argue that it is decategorization that leads to the imperfectionof learners’ acquisition by illustrating how decategorization influences the formationand the usage of nominalization on the one hand and the misunderstanding and misuseoccurred in learners’ acquisition on the other hand.Fourth, the author will provide some implications for the teaching and learning ofEnglish nominalizations and suggestions for future research.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

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