Nominalization and the problem “nominalization in Vietnamese”

Abstract

Nominalization is not mentioned much in in the Vietnamese literature. The main reason is often related to the view of nominalization as a word-forming process, a phenomenon belonging to morphology, lexicon. From this perspective, nominalization in Vietnamese either does not exist or exists unclearly. Recent studies, especially systemic functional grammar, tend to consider nominalization as a cross-linguistic phenomenon. This new approach raises the urgency of reviewing the issue of nominalization in Vietnamese. This article has two purposes: (i) to review studies on nominalization; (ii) to give an explicit, systematic and comprehensive picture of nominalization in Vietnamese.