exploring nominalization in academic writings of students from discipline of psychology

There is a belief that in social science, academic writing includes features from both science and the humanities that change an initial abstract construal of experience into a technical framework for interpretation (wignell, 1998). in addition, there has been a trend towards more use of nouns in a form of nominalization increasing the science nature of academic social science writings (biber & gray 2013, 2016). nominalization plays an important role in academic writing as they can aid writers in maintaining an impersonal tone by deleting a human agent. it functions as helping to increase the quality of academic writing by creating cohesive texts. having the above mention information concerning nominalization, this study intends to shed the light on the realizations and functions of nominalization in academic writing from the discipline of psychology. to this end, 104 papers were selected from the corpus of michigan corpus of upper-level student paper (micusp). the papers were 200,696 words in total. nominalization instances includes nouns ending in suffixes such as –tion, -ness, - ment, - ity, and - ing. nominalization items were classified functionally into six functions namely; material, mental, behavioural, verbal, existential, and relational.the results showed that nominalization with suffixes - ing, -tion, and -ity were more frequent than others. the nominalization instances were used to have different functions namely material, mental, behavioural, verbal, existential, and relational. results of this study could help writers in the discipline of psychology to use nominalization to produce cohesive texts.