Nominalization

In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. The term can also refer specifically to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes (e.g., legalize versus legalization).

Some languages simply allow verbs to be used as nouns without inflectional difference (conversion or zero derivation), while others require some form of morphological transformation. English has cases of both.

Nominalization is a natural part of language, but some instances of it are more noticeable than others. Writing advice sometimes focuses on avoiding uncritical overuse of nominalization.

Two types of nominalization are found in English. One type requires the addition of a derivational suffix to create a noun. In other cases, English uses the same word as a noun without any additional morphology. This second process is referred to as zero-derivation.

This is a process by which a grammatical expression is turned into a noun phrase. For example, in the sentence "Combine the two chemicals," combine acts as a verb. This can be turned into a noun via the addition of -ation, as in "The experiment involved the combination of the two chemicals."

Examples of nouns formed from adjectives:

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