Definition of "nominalization"

Writers who overload their sentences with nominalizations tend to sound pompous and abstract.

2012 July 23, Helen Sword, “Zombie Nouns”, in NY Times‎

The positive use of the feminine noun une rien has been gradually replaced by the nominalization of the pronoun and the adverb that commonly serve as negative auxiliaries, rien, un rien: “The word offers a short version of the evolution of the etymological meaning of chose inverted as néant (c. 1530)” (RT: DHLF) […]

2014 February 9, Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Princeton University Press, page 722

Nominalization and agentless passives have attracted sustained attention in critical linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), where, it is argued, they ‘mystify’, i.e., reduce reader comprehension of, the role of social actors in depictions of events, particularly in news media discourse.

2017 April, William Alan Lingle, Nominalizations, Agentless Passives, and Social Actor Mystification: Newspaper Editorials on the Greek Financial Crisis

Nominalization is a common feature of a more scientific style of writing and is used as an additional measure for syntactic complexity.

2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 5