nominalization

noun

1. (British, English, Oxford, US, countable)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.”

2. (British, English, Oxford, US, uncountable)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 of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF)[…]”

   “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 of social actors in depictions of events, particularly in news media discourse.”

   “Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity.”