Exploring Nominalization in Academic Writing: A Comparative Study of Shipbuilding and Oceanography Engineering and Linguistics

Nominalization, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, is widely used in academic discourse in various fields. In recent years, corpus-based approaches to nominalization have become increasingly prevalent, but nominalization involving academic discourse of Marine-related majors receives little attention. Therefore, this paper selects 108 academic discourse abstracts of Shipbuilding and Oceanography Engineering and 50 abstracts of Linguistics academic discourses, based on the definition of nominalization, the common form of ideational grammatical metaphor from Halliday and Zhu Yongsheng’s classification to achieve the analysis of nominalization. It explores the cross-disciplinary differences and frequency of different types of nominalizations and their functions in the selected abstracts. The results show that the common use of nominalizations and the most frequent type is “take process as thing” which shows a significant difference across the two disciplines, signifying disciplinary differences in academic writing. Besides, this paper finds the three most commonly used nominal patterns of each corpus. It provides a couple of possible reasons and elaborate explanations for the particular consequence, expecting that it can contribute to future research in this field and abstract writing in academic discourse. Keywords: nominalization, grammatical metaphor, academic writing, disciplinary differences and similarities