Nominalization
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. The term can also refer specifically to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes (e.g., legalize versus legalization).
Some languages simply allow verbs to be used as nouns without inflectional difference (conversion or zero derivation), while others require some form of morphological transformation. English has cases of both.
Nominalization is a natural part of language, but some instances of it are more noticeable than others. Writing advice sometimes focuses on avoiding uncritical overuse of nominalization, which yields "zombie nouns".
See also
- Nominal (word)
- Pronominal
- Initial-stress-derived noun
- Deverbal noun
- Verbal noun
- List of plain English words and phrases