A Corpus-Based Quantitative Study of Nominalizations across Chinese and British Media English

PACLIC 28 !101 A Corpus-Based Quantitative Study of Nominalizations across Chinese and British Media English Ying Liu1, Alex Chengyu Fang1, and Naixing Wei2 1Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong yliu227-c@my.cityu.edu.hk, acfang@cityu.edu.hk 2School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing, China nxwei@buaa.edu.cn Abstract This paper reports on a corpus-based quantitative study of the use of nominalizations across China English and British English in two comparable media corpora. In contrast to previous corpus-based studies of nominalizations, we start by using a syntactic approach and proceed with some methodological innovations incorporating large lexical databases and syntactically annotated corpora. The data show that there are significant differences in the use of nominalizations across these two English varieties. It is hoped that this research will offer useful insights on variations in nominalization across different English varieties and also on the understanding of the two English varieties in question. 1 Introduction Nominalization can refer to “the process of forming a noun from some other word-class (e.g. red + ness) or the derivation of a noun phrase from an underlying clause (e.g. Her answering of the letter… from She answered the letter)” (Crystal, 1997: 260). It has been approached by scholars from various perspectives, covering aspects of its form, meaning and use, as in the traditional grammar (e.g. Quirk et al., 1985), generative grammar (e.g. Lees, 1960; Chomsky, 1970), functional grammar (e.g. Halliday, 1994; Eggins, 2004) and cognitive grammar (e.g. Langacker, 1991). Among other things, nominalization is of close relevance to language variation studies due to its function to distinguish a nominal and compressed style from a colloquial one (e.g. Biber, 1986; Greenbaum, 1988, etc). However, in spite of numerous theoretical discussions, nominalization has only been touched upon sporadically in corpus- based studies, with notable exceptions of Biber (1986), Biber et al. (1998, 1999) and Leech et al. (2009). Due to an overwhelming word-based approach and a reliance on suffixes for identification, only a limited scope of nominalizations has been included in previous corpus-based studies. In addition, although these studies have revealed the discriminatory power of nominalization in language use with regard to spoken and written registers and genres, there are few attempts to investigate the use of nominalization across different language varieties except Leech et al. (2009). The research to be reported on in this paper attempts to bridge the afore-said gaps. It is exploratory and descriptive in nature and attempts to examine the cross-variety quantitative differences in the use of nominalizations across China English and British English in two comparable media corpora. Our study is different from previous corpus-based studies in several important respects. First, our study is not about variations of nominalization across registers and genres, but will explore variations across different English varieties, a different level of linguistic variation. The reason why we chose China English is that previous studies (Xu, 2008, 2010) have shown that there are frequent uses of nominalization in China English. British English is chosen as the base for comparison. Second, the present study …

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