nominalization

Noun

1. A noun derived from an adjective, verb, etc., often (in English) by adding a suffix such as -ity, -tion or -ism.
   • Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract. - 2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in NY Times:
   • 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...
2. The act or process of nominalizing; the use of such a noun.
   • 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...
   • 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...
   • Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity. - 2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written...