Investigating the Use of Nominalization: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Learners’ and Native English Speakers’ Argumentative Essays

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Aisha Aslam, Dr Shafaq Fayyaz

Abstract

This research aimed at investigating the frequency of occurrence of nominalization in the argumentative essays written by Pakistani undergraduates and English native speakers. The corpus based analysis using log likelihood (LL) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) showed that the frequency differences of nominalization in argumentative essays written by Pakistani students (PAK) and the argumentative essays written by English native speakers (ENS) are statistically significant. The study has revealed that although there is a statistically significant difference between the frequencies of nominalizations in PAK and ENS, this difference is not evenly distributed across the two corpora. In other words, out of the four different types of nominalizations ending in -tion, -ment, -ity and -ness, nominalizations ending in suffix -tion were ‘overused’ in PAK whereas nominalizations ending in suffix -ment were ‘overused’ in ENS. This clearly depicts the lexical preferences shown by Pakistani undergraduates and English native speakers. Significant contributions of this study are the benchmarking it provides for more diverse and in depth studies on nominalizations in the context of Pakistani Academic English, and offering informed insights for pedagogical implications.

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