to nominalize
1
8.6
- verb
- /ˈnɑːmɪnəlaɪz/
- Specialized
- We in the West (globally—not the western U.S.) tend to nominalize and objectify way too much.
Examples
-
In academic writing, you can nominalize verbs to create more complex noun phrases.
-
It's almost as if by labeling, nominalizing, and objectifying we could somehow 'possess' the **36;3592;TOOLONG.
Blog text (9) -
The highly compacted and nominalized style is essential to the genre move in sentence 1, but its sentence-level style can be analyzed without knowing which particular move it helps make.
Academic text (2002) -
When writers nominalize, instead of using a verb in a clause to represent an action, they change the verb into a noun in a noun phrase (for example, they change "we analyzed the results" into "our analysis of the results").
Academic text (2003) -
Fourth, if researchers make good progress toward discovering how writers, especially writers of science, learn how to produce nominalized abstraction, it would be a natural extension of their research to ask whether the style they study changes at all from section to section of scientific reports or from one rhetorical move that scientists make to another (see Swales, Aspects and Genre Analysis).
Academic text (2003) -
Writers often nominalize actions by using expressions like 'the completion of the project' instead of 'completing the project.'
-
To improve clarity, try to nominalize phrases that contain verbs, transforming them into concise noun forms.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Nominalize comes from the Latin word nomen meaning 'name' and the ending -ize meaning 'to make', so it literally means 'to make into a name'. This is why to nominalize is to turn a verb or adjective into a noun.