#nominalization

Similar to how verb clauses can be used to describe nouns, they can also be turned into nouns with the addition of こと or の. This is similar to the addition of “to ~” or “~ing” to verbs in English to turn them into nouns. Making this form is simple, and only requires the plain, present tense of the verb.

読む　＋　の・こと　⇒　読むの・読むこと 趣味は読むことです。 My hobby is reading.

泳ぐ　＋　の・こと　⇒　泳ぐの・泳ぐこと 泳ぐのが苦手です。 I’m no good at swimming.

Often times there are more specific nouns like 読書 (reading) or 水泳 (swimming) that can be used instead, but using こと or の is handy if (1) you haven’t learned those fancier words yet, or (2) you want to describe a more specific situation.

趣味は外国語の小説を読むことです。 My hobby is reading novels in foreign languages.

朝５時に冷たいプールで泳ぐのが苦手です。 I don’t like swimming at 5 am in a freezing pool.

こと and の can both be attached to adjectives as well, though it’s distinctively different from the nominalization of adjectives by adding 〜さ (~ness). In this case, there’s usually an implied “being” hanging around there, or it’s being used as part of a longer clause. In this case, い-adjectives and な-adjectives will combine with こと or の as they would with any noun.

ピーマンが嫌いなのは、ちょっと子供っぽいでしょ？ It’s a little childish to dislike green peppers, isn’t it?

Much like the English “to ~” and “~ing”, there are times when you would use either こと or の but not the other, and also times when both can be used interchangeably. It can take a bit of instinct to figure out what’s more natural, but typically の is more concrete while こと is more abstract.

For example, の would be used with verbs that describe actions or states observed with the speaker’s five senses, such as 見える (to be visible) or 聞こえる (to be audible). の is also used the sentence’s main verb is done in observation of someone else’s actions.

Meanwhile, こと is more natural than の when paired with the copula だ／です. It is also used for verbs expressing communication or thoughts, like 伝える (to convey) or 約束する (to promise).

For expressing things that you like or dislike, こと seems to be the more natural choice… but really, either one is okay to use! (More on the differences between the two here and here.)

ここ自転車で走るのもすごい久しぶりだな It's been a long time since I rode my bike here. (⇒ Riding my bike here, it's been a long time.)

(『よつばと！』 Yotsuba&!, vol. 6 by Azuma Kiyohoko)

色々と知りたいって顔だ 寝物語の代わりに答えられることなら答えてあげよう I can tell from your expression there's many things you want to know. Instead of a bedtime story, I'll answer your questions if it's something I can answer.

(『魔法使いの嫁』The Ancient Magus' Bride, vol. 1 by Yamazaki Kore)

J-Rock Examples:

思い出せないけど／忘れられないこと I can’t remember but / they’re things I can’t forget

生きてんのは死ぬ為 Living for the sake of dying

［宇多田ヒカル - 忘却 featuring KOHH］

Mind Is A Verb, Not A Noun

When talking about our minds, we have a tendency to take complicated processes and treat them as simplified things. For example, we say we want “happiness” or “confidence” or “motivation” but how do we know when we really have them?

This video bothers me. If you’ve never heard of them before, nominalizations are parts of speech (like a noun or a verb, but typically a adjective) that become/are used as nouns. Often, they get suffixes added to them to make them nouns. Tend (v) -> tendency (n) Nominal (adj) -> nominalization (n) These are often decried in writing for creating ambiguous phrases. The video asserts that using these will make your writing impenetrable, and furnishes several examples (including George Orwell’s famous Politics and the English language example where he turns a bit of Ecclesiastes into a legal-sounding soup).

The problem is that the ways these nominalizations affect out language is far far more complicated than the video lets on. The nominalizations used in this video, aside from being merely adjectives whipped up into nouns with a suffix, are also words from a higher register--words a 3rd grader wouldn’t know, but words a 12th grader might. As such, they’re more foreign to the average English speaker. The means of construction in and of itself does not make a word more or less powerful, or even more or less concrete, or sensuous. The passage from Ecclesiastes is not more evocative because the words used are free from derivational affixes. It’s sensuous and evocative because a lot of metaphor is used. Furthermore, a lot of the most powerful punches in the passage (“the swift”, “the strong”) are adjectives being used as nouns.

Nominalization allows us to create new words. Even dumb new words: joy (n) -> joyful (adj) -> joyfulness wonder (n) -> wonderment (n)!?!?!

So we have a word that means one thing, we add a suffix to make it an adjective, then add another to make it a noun that means the same thing. Or, with ‘wonderment’, we take a noun... and add a suffix to make it a noun that means the same damn thing.

But English has a powerful hate of synonyms. And like it or not (I hate it, personally), those dumb dumb dumb words are achieving slightly different meanings from one another. Notice that they are all words to describe happiness (another nominalization). Things we feel a lot, we tend to want new ways of talking about.

 Nominalization (or changing one part of speech to ANY other part of speech, for that matter) is a powerful way to pack on connotation, extra meaning, flavors of a different register. Yes, it is precisely these reasons why nominalizations are often used in legal writing: where metaphor will not do, where things must be written in the highest register, and where a lot of meaning must be conveyed lexically rather than syntactically. But just because the tool is most useful to those institutions we find the most boring, doesn’t mean that the tool itself is a harbinger for dreary prose.