What’s More Important: Nouns or Verbs?
Illustration: Unsplash, author: Bonnie Kittle
By Heather Belgorodtseva,
an EFL Teacher and Teacher Trainer,
who ran a series of workshops at the Academic Writing Center.
She can also be found writing about discourse analysis and
online communication at Those Sharp Words.
There are more nouns than verbs in written English. There are even more nouns in academic texts. In fact, almost 60% of all content words in academic prose consists of nouns.
This throws up two points of interest. Firstly, what exactly do we mean by a noun and secondly, why?
What is a noun phrase?
Actually by noun, what we are really talking about is noun phrases. We can take a rather bare noun like ‘coffee’ and add to it. A mug of coffee (determiner). Fresh black coffee (adjectives). Filter coffee (noun modifier). Coffee from Ethiopia (prepositional phrase). Coffee served scaldingly hot (participle clause). Coffee which has gone cold while I type all this (relative clause). And we can put all that together, thus: a mug of fresh black filter coffee from Ethiopia served scaldingly hot which has gone cold while I type all this.
Obviously that takes quite a bit of grammar. Determiners include knowing about articles, countability, and quantifiers. Adjective and noun modifiers mean we need to learn the order of strings of these words, and likely collocations with the main (or ‘head’) noun. We also need to pay attention to dependent prepositions, and not only the difference between defining and non defining clauses, but how to reduce them, and what the difference between using an ing form and the past participle to do so is.
To be fair, all of this is often covered in an individual way in language courses. Putting them together? Perhaps not so much. Especially as you may have noticed that as well as the main head noun, there are other nouns. And we could embellish these further too! A giant souvenir mug from St Petersburg of fresh black filter coffee from the east of Ethiopia… etc, etc, etc.
Then there's the tendency to take a verb and noun it in academic English, a process called nominalisation. So not Heather is drinking coffee this morning but the encoffeefication* of Heather is in process this morning. Yes, I appreciate that sentence still has a verb, but be hardly counts here, does it?
However!
None of this, while fiddly, is as interesting as why it happens, and here we, as writers, might have some decisions to make.
Academic modesty or unassailable truth?
Some of this is very much linked to the usage of the passive as a way of putting the emphasis (in academia) on what is being studied rather than the researcher doing the studying. The encoffeefication of Heather is very much a situation without an apparently obvious doer. Academic modesty at its finest - the idea, the breakthrough, or the research is far more important than the person doing the studying.
Of course, this usage can also suggest that something has more solidity, is more permanently true, and less subjective than perhaps the subject warrants. Academic writers in certain fields, therefore, need to consider how far we want or need to stray down this path, and how far we feel that reasoned evaluation of the currently available evidence is just as acceptable as putting our arguments on the footing of unarguable truths.
Precision, brevity or obfuscation**?
There's no doubt that using noun phrases can be more precise - hopefully you have quite a clear picture of exactly what coffee is part of my morning ritual, for example. They also pack a lot of information into relatively few words, which given that research papers for journals often have quite limited word counts is no small advantage. Especially if we work in a field where short but frequent works updating colleagues around the world in a field of continuous fresh developments is the norm.
Of course, concise does not necessarily mean easy to understand. The more densely packed the noun phrase is, the more it becomes accessible primarily to other academics familiar with the now very jargon-like language. The absolute apogee of this is the increasing tendency for noun + noun phrases to replace other ways of adding information to nouns, transforming the encoffeefication of Heather this morning into the morning Heather encoffeefication.
Naming and claiming
Finally, another advantage in creating a new noun phrase, especially a concise but very specific one is that we can coin a new piece of terminology. And if it catches on, then we are advancing the idea that this is an actual distinct concept, and our connection to it. We can claim, in fact, ownership of the whole idea.
Capitalisation helps here. So not just the morning Heather encoffeefication but the Morning Heather Encoffeefication. Or MHE for short.
One way to decide if a particularly concise noun phrase might be a bit much is to see if anyone else in the field is calling it that. If it is an accepted term, fine. If not, unless we do want to start a trend, perhaps more clarity might help.
In conclusion
Noun phrases and nominalisation are very much part of academic writing, and knowing about how they are put together helps us read other people’s research just as much as it aids our own writing.
But as with most language items, it's not just an understanding of how to construct them that is important but making a conscious choice about when to use them, and how appropriate it is for the field we are working and the message we want to convey.
Further reading
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Longman
Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2016). Grammatical complexity in academic English: Linguistic change in writing. Cambridge University Press.
Billig, M. (2013). Learn to write badly: How to succeed in the social sciences. Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). The language of science. Continuum.
Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. (Kevin). (2021). Academic naming: Changing patterns of noun use in research writing. Journal of English Linguistics, 49(3), 255–282. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424219888448
*Not a real word.
** This is a real word.