1 Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray Northern Arizona University (Please note the tables and figures for this paper can be found in a separate Excel file.) 1. Introduction One of the most distinctive linguistic characteristics of modern academic writing is its reliance on nominalized structures. These include nouns that have been morphologically derived from verbs (e.g., development, progression) as well as verbs that have been ‘converted’ to nouns (e.g., increase, use). Almost any sentence taken from an academic research article will illustrate the use of such structures. For example, consider the opening sentences from three education research articles; derived nominalizations are underlined and converted nouns given in italics: 1 Now that programed instruction has emerged from the laboratories of experimental psychologists and become a bona fide teaching aid, consideration is being given to the expansion and utilization of the media by which programs are presented. [1965, Acad-NS] With the strain that increased enrollments are placing on the resources of many colleges and universities, these institutions are becoming more concerned with minimizing the inefficiency arising from student transfers. [1965, Acad-NS] This paper reports an analysis of Tucker's central prediction system model and an empirical comparison of it with two competing models. [1965, Acad-NS] In most cases, it is easy to restate the information using verbs and clauses. For example: someone is considering the way in which the media has expanded and is being utilized students are transferring from colleges and enrolling in other colleges we analyzed a model that predicts systems, and compared it to other models However, in academic writing it is more common to use nominalized rather than verbal structures to express information of this type. Halliday (2004: xvi-xvii) refers to this characteristic of academic writing as a heavy reliance on ‘grammatical metaphor’, where nouns are used with meanings beyond their normal ‘category meanings’. Thus, according to Halliday, the category meaning of nouns is to refer to ‘entities’, but nominalizations refer to ‘processes’ and ‘qualities’, taking on instead the category meanings of typical verbs and adjectives.