Nominalisation

Advanced: Noun groups give us grammatical control

We can get a long way in our writing just with "nominalisations let us turn processes and qualities into things so that we can use interesting verbs and qualities instead of boring and less informative connectors".

But if you're willing to probe the underlying grammar, we can unlock a whole other level of control and precision.

This comes when you understand the grammatical roles that noun groups can play in a sentence.

Don't be scared off by the terminology below! What we'll look at on this page is only a more formal, precise way of talking about 'things' and 'actions', exactly as we've been exploring over the last couple of pages.

On this page, we are going to look at three roles that word groups can play in a clause. Two of them should feel familiar:

  • Subject—the 'thing' that does something (‘The cat chases the dog’).
  • Object—the 'thing' the action is happening to (‘The cat chases the dog’, 'There is a hill').

And we'll add one more:

  • Prepositional object—a 'thing' that gives extra context introduced by a preposition like in, at, on, with... (‘The cat chases the dog through the window’).

You could think of it as "A did something to B in the presence of C" or "In the presence of C, A did something to B".

Can you find each of the three roles in this sentence from The Ghost Map?

In his mind Snow was already drawing maps.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World(2006)

Since nominalisations are noun groups, they can play all these three roles too!

What roles are the nominalisations in each of these snippets playing?

  • Doing something (Subject)
  • Having something done to it (Object)
  • Providing context (Prepositional object)

Communications between the tribes of the New World were slow, and news of the Europeans’ barbarities rarely overtook the rapid spread of new conquests and settlements.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee(1970)

In recent years, there has been much discussion of participatory mapping and the democratization of cartography. Today participatory mapping is usually considered a product of the GIS era as it involves groups of people who gather information that is then mapped using GIS. The democratization of cartography refers to anyone with a computer being able to make a map; thus, maps are no longer the sole province of the "professionals".

Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History(2019)

While the toiling masses throughout the world pretty much ignored the date, the Soviet toiling masses were ordered by the party to show their ideological zeal with street demonstrations. Parades of seemingly cheery workers and peasants dressed in holiday attire, marching with their children to the accompaniment of musical bands, were a standard feature of Soviet political culture. Such manifestations were particularly important after the accident to show that things were under control, with the party, and Gorbachev in particular, firmly in charge.

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters(2022)

Being able to give nominalisations all these different roles lets us be a lot more flexible and precise in how we express the relationships between concepts.

Let's play around for a minute.

To get a feel for how you can put nominalisations into precise relationships, we're going to take some of the nominalisations from the last few snippets and recombine them to make new sentences.

These sentences won't be truthful or accurate, but they should 'make sense':

Communications between the tribes of the New World led to the democratization of cartography through their ideological zeal.

After much discussion of participatory mapping, street demonstrations protested such manifestations with the accompaniment of musical bands.

Write your own version, using any combination of these nominalisations in any way you’d like. (Don’t worry about being factual—just play around with it.)

We've talked about how noun groups can flexibly function as subjects, objects, and prepositional objects.

But the flexibility doesn't stop there! Noun groups can also function as components within other noun groups! 🤯

For example, this snippet of text is a nominalisation:

  • The beginnings of a new era of choice for Europe's workers...

But the nominalisation itself has two nominalisations inside it (!):

  • The beginnings of a new era of choice for Europe's workers...

The key insight here is that complex noun groups are built of smaller ones, and anywhere you can have a noun group, you can have a nominalisation.

For example, 'The beginnings of a new era of choice for Europe's workers...' has four smaller noun groups embedded within different functional parts of the larger noun group:

  • ‘Choice’ is the main noun. 
  • ‘The beginnings of’ and 'a new era of' are focuses, telling us what aspect of the thing being described we are interested in.
  • 'For Europe's workers' is a qualifier, giving us more detail, and 'Europe's workers' is a noun group inside it.
  • (Note: Noun groups also sometimes turn up in the classifiers or pointers of other noun groups.)

Any of these noun groups could be turned into nominalisations, so you could have nominalisations within nominalisations within... (until you get to the Infinity Stone).

For example, let's embed two new nominalisations in our sample snippet:

  • The beginnings of the new suffrage movement’s era of choice for the accessibility needs of Europe's workers…

You get the picture.

There's nothing you specifically need to do with this information; we're just pointing it out so you're not spooked when you realise nominalisations are literally everywhere in more advanced academic writing.

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