Examining the application of nominalization in segmented abstracts: a corpus-based study

1 Introduction

Research articles are an important constituent of scientific genres. Textual organization and linguistic choices are required in research articles (Lim, 2006). Analysing research articles has practical reasons that its formal style makes it distinguished from other genres, and therefore, for scholars, an academic style is conducive to obtaining international recognition from publishing papers; for learners, raising the awareness of differences of text expression and organization in discourse can facilitate the learning and understanding of academic writings (Arizavi et al., 2015).

Academic writing has the feature of abstraction, objectivity, condensation, technicality, authoritativeness, high lexical density, and internal reasoning (Fang, 2005; Halliday, 1998; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Hamp-Lyons & Heasley, 2006; Hyland, 2009; Schleppegrell, 2004; Simon-Vandenbergen et al., 2003; Snow, 2010), which require the adoption of grammatical metaphors (GMs), particularly nominalization. From the linguistic point of view, the high frequency of nominalized structures is one of the most conspicuous features of academic science writing (Biber & Gray, 2013). Furthermore, more uses of nominalization are associated with more specialized technicality (Thompson, 2004).

Abstracts, as the most concise part in research articles, consist of the most various kinds of information, including research objectives, methods, results, and even implications and suggestions. Hence, abstracts are required to be concise and informative, which calls for a large amount use of nominalizations to realize multiple functions. Although a few studies have tapped into the analysis of abstracts (Holtz, 2009, 2011; Prasithrathsint, 2014), in this study, a special type of abstract, segmented abstracts, was explored concerning the different use of nominalizations in distinct parts within the segmented abstracts.

Segmented abstracts are a new format to illustrate required the information of research articles. The segmented abstract is not only a distributed writing construction for authors to demonstrate the content of research articles but also a clear reading construction for readers to seek information and know the newest research results. The position at the beginning also highlights the importance of segmented abstracts in academic articles. The exploration of nominalization in published segmented abstracts can identify the distribution and function of nominalizations. Therefore, scholars can learn about the usage of nominalizations to have a better understanding of the nominalizations in segmented abstracts and create qualified segmented abstracts.

2 Literature review

3 Materials and methods

The research method of corpus linguistics was adopted. A total of 30 recently published abstracts with segmented features from the American Journal of Psychiatry were used to compile the corpus in this study. The American Journal of Psychiatry is the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, the third most widely read and cited psychiatric journal in the field of psychiatry (impact factor 19.242 in 2021) and the most widely read and cited psychiatric journal worldwide (48,015 total citations in 2021). The 30 abstracts were drawn from 7 issues of the American Journal of Psychiatry between 2021 and 2022 (from volume 178, issue 11 to volume 179, issue 5), covering topics including autism, depression, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 7,836 lexical tokens were included in the 30 abstracts.

This study used TagAnt to annotate all the lexical tokens that appeared in the abstracts and employed AntConc for subsequent screening using nominalization suffixes. Then, extracting nominalization from the lexical tokens was supplemented by manual secondary annotation. The criterion for nominalization is the transformation of an action or a process into a concept. According to previous studies (Biber, 1988; Holtz, 2009; Jalilifar et al., 2018), nominalization suffixes can be divided into (1) transformations from verbs to nouns (process nominalization), such as develop to development, with query suffixes such as -age (dose to dosage), -al (propose to proposal), -(e)ry (recover to recovery), -sion/-tion (conclude to conclusion), -ment (develop to development), -sis (analyse to analysis), -ure (fail to failure) and -th (grow to growth) and their corresponding plural forms; and (2) conversions from adjectives to nouns (quality nominalization), such as heritable to heritability, with query suffixes such as -ity (dense to density), -ness (thick to thickness), and -ance (important to importance) and their corresponding plural forms. The use of nominalization from nouns is not common in academic discourse, so this study only considers the phenomenon of nominalization from verbs and adjectives (Conrad & Biber, 2001). Furthermore, due to the concentration of the topics in this journal, “depression” and lexical markers in proper nouns (e.g., The Prescription Drug Abuse System) were not taken into account in the analysis of nominalization.

4 Results

5 Discussion

The results show that the segmented abstracts had the longest average length of the “Results” section and the highest number of nominalizations, but the “Conclusions” section had the highest frequency of nominalizations. The “Results” section assumes a descriptive function, mainly to accurately convey information and describe results, with a certain degree of abstraction, and the sentences rely more on lexical rather than referential cohesion (e.g., Outcome groups differed in neuroanatomical features … neuroanatomical differences …). The “Conclusions” part here was similar to the “Discussion” part of the main body of research articles (e.g., The results suggest that … the lack of age-related changes indexes … The progressive disruption of gamma-band response supports …). As it affords the function of condensing the preceding information, explaining the findings, and revealing the significance of the research or contribution to the field, it is the most argumentative and abstract section and thus prefers to use the theme structure to construct logic to support the arguments and persuade readers (Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017; Martínez, 2003). At the same time, the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of research articles plays an important role in enhancing persuasiveness (Arizavi et al., 2015), and, in a study by Gao (2012) on the use of nominalization in the “Discussion” section of medical articles, the author found that nominalizations facilitated logic construction and formality; therefore, the “Conclusions” section tended to use more nominalizations to develop logic in order to persuade readers of the results or significance of the study in a segmented abstract.

The significant difference in the use of nominalization between different sections in the segmented abstract suggests that the segmented abstract mimics a structure similar to the body section in a dissertation, i.e., Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion (IMRD) (Swales, 1990), with the first part of the abstract being the research part of the introduction, which presents only the objective of the study. Therefore, the content of each section varies and the degree of nominalization use varies, which is also consistent with previous studies that have found different distributions of nominalization in different parts of academic articles (Arizavi et al., 2015; Jalilifar, Saleh et al., 2017).

Second, in a few abstracts with high use of nominalization, the use of nominalization ensured consistency and coherence in the use of language – as well as a full account of the context of the study and a summary and interpretation of the results – enhanced the richness of the content, and expanded the coverage. At the same time, the conciseness and accuracy of the language required more involvement of nominalization, which is also in compliance with the characteristics of abstracts found in previous studies (Bhatia, 1993; Brusaw, 1982; Corson, 1997; Mahbudi et al., 2014; Saffura, 2019; Yue & Zhang, 2019).

Statistics on the frequency of the use of nominalization suffixes indicate a greater use of -sion/-tion, -ment, and -ity as suffixes for process and quality nominalization in abstract writing, which aligns with previous research on traditional non-segmented abstracts, suggesting that the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts still follows the traditional pattern. On the one hand, process nominalization can (1) reduce the length of the text and make it more concise. For example, the nominalized expression environmental exposure is shorter than the non-nominalized version be exposed in the environment; and (2) increase the level of abstraction and make the text more technical. For example, compared with variation in clinical outcome is associated with both group- and individual-level …, the non-nominalized expression the clinical outcome varies, which is associated with both group- and individual-level … consists of two clauses (a main clause and a subordinate clause) and is less abstract. On the other hand, quality nominalization (1) helps construct coherence. For instance, Methods: The authors identified participants with fully remitted, partially remitted, and persistent ADHD at each time point … Longitudinal patterns of remission and persistence were identified that considered context and timing. Results: only 10.8% demonstrated stable ADHD persistence across study time points …. In the “Methods” section, the words “persistent” and “persistence” were mutually exclusive and avoided repetition in language use. The “persistence” in the “Results” section and the “persistence” in the “Methods” section mutually reinforced and built coherence between the sections; and (2) weakens the subjective expression and makes the text more objective. For example, in the sentence leading to increased disease susceptibility, the non-nominalized expression “susceptible” is an adjective whose meaning might be misleading to some extent that “who thinks what is susceptible” will convey the subjective view of the author or a subject, and thus reduce the level of objectivity. Thus, the segmented abstracts still show a consistent distribution and tendency in terms of lexical choice and transformation in the types of nominalization and do not show an inconsistent tendency in the functional use of nominalization.

6 Conclusions

To investigate the characteristics of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts, this study adopted a corpus linguistic approach and found significant differences in the use of nominalization between the four sections within segmented abstracts, suggesting that the requirement of the segmented abstract produces distinctions in the content of the sections, which in turn affects the construction and expression in different sections; consequently, the degree of use of nominalization varies. At the same time, the structure of the segmented abstracts resembles the division of the body of research articles, tending to make the most use of nominalization in the last section for the purposes of summary, explanation and suggestion. Furthermore, in several cases where nominalizations were used more frequently, it is shown that although the requirements of the segmented abstract are clear, there is flexibility in the coverage of the content; consequently, the requirements for nominalizations also vary. In terms of the specific use of nomenclature, the use of process and quality nominalizations in segmented summaries is similar to that of traditional whole-paragraph abstracts and is resonant with the function of nominalization, which is used to condense information, build coherence and weaken subject, making the abstracts more concise, objective and information-dense.

First of all, the focus on the occurrence of nominalization in segmented abstracts may raise scholars’ awareness of the important role of nominalization in academic writing, which can contribute to their learning and writing by using nominalization to create a more informative and concise work.

The investigation of segmented abstracts is also meaningful for the instructors and learners in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which can assist them in having a better understanding of segmented abstracts in research articles and obtaining the writing ability, making them reap the benefits of the opportunity to publish studies in the journals that require segmented abstracts.

Analysis of segmented abstracts can provide knowledge of the most frequent types of nominalization and the common suffixes of nominalization to scholars and learners, which can help them understand the process of nominalization and notice the varieties of nominalization. For example, when they want to express the meaning that consists of a process or an action (e.g., it had been exposed in the environment, so it was infected), they can transfer the dynamic process into a nominalized form by searching for its noun form (e.g., environmental exposure made it infected). The nominalization of expose to exposure shortens the expression and increases the conciseness and technicality.

For ESP teachers, explicit instruction on the importance of nominalization is crucial. The teachers can first introduce the meaning of nominalization and then give some examples. After that, the teachers could turn to corpus tools to show the use of nominalizations in writing to learners. Take AntConc as an example. Since the frequently used suffixes of nominalization have been identified, after the teacher compiles all the writings intended for class, the use of nominalization in this specific corpus can be recognized through the searching of particular suffixes. Also, ESP teachers can create two corpora (a journal article corpus and a sample writing corpus) to compare if there is a lack of awareness in learners that published journals may demonstrate more use of nominalizations, which generates the visual contrast for students to see. Moreover, using corpus tools can facilitate the identification of nominalization distributed in different parts of writings. The significant distribution of nominalization in a particular part could be explained with the function of nominalizations to specify the utility of nominalization in writings. Showing the results of the distribution of nominalizations or accompanying learners to identify nominalizations in texts can contribute to both their awareness and understanding of the use of nominalizations. In this process, computer-assisted learning serves as a better way, which achieves the purpose of studying in a larger context and making parallel comparison, contributing to comprehensive learning and creating a more direct visualization.

In addition to the frequency distribution of nominalization and the use of nominalization suffixes to study the characteristics of segmented abstracts, collocation before and after nominalizations and the transitivity system are also important aspects of the study of nominalization. Therefore, future research can investigate nominalization in abstracts in terms of both the modifiers that accompany nominalization and the transitivity system.

This study only analysed 30 articles selected from a specific journal, which neither explored this journal deeply nor explained nominalization in segmented abstracts broadly; therefore, more journals in various disciplines and more samples can be collected in future studies to show a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of nominalization in segmented abstracts. Moreover, apart from the use and function of nominalization, other typical features in segmented abstracts could be paid attention to, for example, the role of the segmentation of abstracts in increasing legibility and transmissibility.