Action Nominalizations in Business English: A Corpus Study

Abstract

Action nominalizations are employed in business English to attain a higher degree of condensation, abstraction, and accuracy. This paper reports on a corpus-based study of the actual usage patterns of -tion nominals in business news. In contrast to previous corpus-based studies of nominalizations, we adopt a syntactic approach and focus on the realization of the argument structure of -tion nominals. The primary aim of the paper is to shed light on the formal characteristics of the action nominalization patterns in business English, as well as to identify tendencies in the usage of -tion nominals in business writing.

Keywords

• action nominalization
• argument structure
• nominal
• corpus
• occurrence frequency