Nouns and nominalizations in economics textbooks

Abstract

Grammatical metaphors are indispensable resources that scientists employ to create scientific worlds. Nominalization, as a powerful tool of grammatical metaphor, can shed new light on the nature of economics through reconstruing human experiences in the process of economic activities. This study endeavours to initiate an innovative way to study nominalizations in economics discourses by extracting nouns in a self-built 1-million-word corpus of economics textbooks (CETB). The results show that nouns and nominalizations, accounting respectively for 21% and 10% of the total words in the corpus, have construed the vast theoretical edifice of modern economic knowledge. In addition to transmitting disciplinary knowledge to achieve ideational functions, nominalizations can also situate the participants within the economics discourse community to fulfil interpersonal functions, and facilitate the text to progress as a chain of reasoning to perform textual functions. This investigation of nouns as well as lexical bundles not only provides new insights into nominalization but also provides an important entry point to observe discipline-specific lexis and the typical co-text in which items occur. This study, as a combination of work in economics, corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics, has implications for education in economics as well as the study of disciplinary English in other fields.

Computational Linguistic Assessment of Textbooks and Online Texts by Means of Threshold Concepts in Economics

“…It has also been highlighted by business and economics studies on threshold concepts (e.g., Meyer and Land, 2006). A large number of (compound) nouns is also confirmed in the textbook study by Hu and Gao (2019). In light of the above-mentioned specificity demand of languages of science, this feature is expected.…”

“…In collegelevel economic education, an increase of the usage of digital learning tools in formal education has been acknowledged for many years (Simkins, 1999). Besides textbooks (Hu and Gao, 2019), Wikipedia is considered for initial orientation and for dealing with economic content, too (Meier, 2008;Haab et al, 2012;Freire and Li, 2016).…”

Research on the Self-improvement Path of Teachers’ Information Literacy from the Perspective of Multimodal Teaching

“…In the actual teaching process, the two-way feedback interactions between teachers and students rely not only on the independent operation of a single modality, but also on the interworking and collaboration between multiple modalities (Zhang & Li, 2012). Multi-literacy is mainly regarded as the ability to acquire and process information in multimodal situations (Zhu, 2008), including cultural literacy and technical literacy (Hu, 2007). With the in-depth application of information technology in the field of education, it is increasingly necessary to improve the technical literacy (also known as information literacy) ability of teachers and students (Zhang, 2012), which directly affects the efficiency and effect of multimodal meaning-making by teachers and students using technical tools and information resources, and thus indirectly affects the quality of multimodal teaching.…”