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1. THE CONCEPT OF NOMINALIZATION<br />

Albentosa-Hernández and Moya-Guijarro (2001) deal with nominalizations and<br />

reduction of transitivity in English scientific writing. In their study, they concede that<br />

nominalizations, as well as the passive construction and the absence of “I,” endow<br />

scientific discourse with precision. However, they also claim that these constructions may<br />

render the scientific text complex and unclear. This is the reason why they warn against<br />

the “harmful” effects of a nominal style (for a similar view, see Jespersen [1924]).<br />

Finally, Andersen (2007) analyzes Norwegian deverbal nouns retrieved from the<br />

Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. He finds that these nominals are “in a state of flux”<br />

(2007: 83), that is, different nominalizations occupy different positions in the continuum<br />

from what he terms 'perfect' to 'imperfect' nouns (cf. [27] below).<br />

(27) Perfect noun ___________________________imperfect noun<br />

Skudd slag brudd drap salg kjøp<br />

‘shot’ ‘beat’ ‘breach’ ‘killing’ ‘sale’ ‘buying’<br />

idiosyncratic<br />

predictable<br />

no argument structure<br />

argument structure<br />

no participant structure<br />

participant structure<br />

(Andersen 2007: 73)<br />

Andersen (2007: 67) proposes that, by a process of lexicalization, the “nominalization<br />

path starts with imperfect nouns in the direction of perfect nouns.” In this process,<br />

nominalizations reduce or lose argument structure and increase semantic and<br />

morphological idiosyncrasy, that is, they increase the semantic difference with their base<br />

verbs in the sense that “there is no regular way the noun form can be derived from the<br />

corresponding verb” (Andersen 2007: 71).<br />

42

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