Academic Naming

Changing Patterns of Noun Use in Research Writing

Bibliographic Data

ID21416992
AuthorsK Hyland (0000-0002-4727-8355, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK), Feng Jiang (0000-0001-7369-9498, Jilin University, Changchun, Jilin, China, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume49
Issue3
Pages255-282
Publication date2021-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of English Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0075-4242 • E-ISSN: 1552-5457
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/00754242211019080
OpenAlexW3163245605
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited19

In this paper we explore the ways academics name processes as things and how these practices have changed over the past fifty years. Focusing on nominalization, noun-noun sequences, and acronyms, we document an increase in these features across a corpus of 2.2 million words within a consistent set of journals from four disciplines. Our results show that nominalizations and acronyms have increased in all four fields, particularly in applied linguistics and sociology, and that while noun-noun sequences have fallen in electrical engineering, they have risen in the other disciplines, especially sociology. We also suggest that noun-noun phrases have increasingly come to name methodological approaches, rather than concepts or objects, and we seek to account for these changes. We observe that these increases in naming are related to the need for succinctness in modern research writing and the advantages of endowing named objects with a real existence which can then be credited with explanatory authority. We question, however, the appropriacy of these practices for interpretation in the social sciences

Corpus linguistics · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Nominalization · Noun · Noun phrase · Proper noun · Set (abstract data type) · Sociology · Succinctness · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · linguistics and terminology studies · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy

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