nominalizare

Nominalizare is the process by which a word or phrase with a verbal, adjectival, or clausal origin is turned into a noun phrase. In linguistics, nominalization allows actions, events, or properties to be referred to as entities, enabling new syntactic roles and abstraction in discourse.

Nominalization occurs in several ways. Morphological nominalization uses affixes to derive nouns from verbs or adjectives (for example, in English, suffixes such as -ment, -tion, or -ing yield deverbal nouns like arrangement, production, running). Syntactic nominalization includes conversion, where a word changes category without a visible affix. Clausal nominalization turns an entire clause into a noun phrase, as in "the fact that he left" or "his leaving."

Types include deverbal nominalizations, which are nouns derived from verbs and often denote events or processes, and sentential nominalizations, which treat a whole clause as a unit within a larger structure (for example, "the decision to leave" or "the occurrence of rain"). Some languages encode additional information about aspect, voice, or agency in their nominalizations, while others rely more on periphrastic constructions to express the same ideas.

Usage and function: Nominalizations can serve as subjects, objects, or complements, and they frequently enable more abstract or compact phrasing. They can influence referential clarity, argument structure, and information packaging in a sentence or text.

Notes: The term is widely used in linguistic literature to discuss how languages encode actions and events as nouns. The exact productive forms and preferences for nominalization vary across languages.