nominalization

English

Examples

Alternative forms

Etymology

From nominal +‎ -ization, or nominalize +‎ -ation.

Pronunciation

  • Audio (Southern England):(file)

Noun

nominalization (countable and uncountable, plural nominalizations) (American spelling, Oxford British English)

  1. (linguistics, countable) A noun derived from an adjective, verb, etc., often (in English) by adding a suffix such as -ity, -tion or -ism.
    • 2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in The New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 10 September 2026:
      Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.
    • 2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 77:
      All words have argument structures. The argument structure of many nouns—such as names—is empty: We don’t need other words to complete them. But singular count nouns need a determiner to the left. And nominalizations of verbs have argument structures to follow. For example, a noun like destruction has a similar argument structure as its corresponding verb destroy: […]
  2. (linguistics, uncountable) The act or process of nominalizing; the use of such a noun.
    • 2014 February 9, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 722:
      The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF) […]
    • 2017 April, William Alan Lingle, Nominalizations, Agentless Passives, and Social Actor Mystification: Newspaper Editorials on the Greek Financial Crisis:
      Nominalization and agentless passives have attracted sustained attention in critical linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), where, it is argued, they ‘mystify’, i.e., reduce reader comprehension of, the role of social actors in depictions of events, particularly in news media discourse.
    • 2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 5:
      Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity.
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:nominalization.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Translations

Further reading

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