Page 123 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

NOUNS ANDTHE NOUN PHRASE 109
agriculture, transportation, and commerce. On the other hand, the plural form developments refers to events and occurrences:
Many developments in the political arena point to a possibility of early elections.
The plural form developments refers to small and separate events or occasions. In other words, when used in singular these nouns refer to overall constructs, and in plural to smaller instances/subdivisions of these constructs.
The same principle of identifying meanings of singular and plural forms can apply to other nouns that may be considered noncount, but are employed in both plural and singular:
beer—beers, cake—cakes, change—changes, cheese—cheeses, chocolate—choco- lates, coffee-coffees, coke—cokes, hair—hairs, glass—glasses, milk—milks, pa-
per—papers, tea—teas, time—times, wine—wines, work—works, youth—youths All these refer to whole notions/concepts/mass quantities or one instance
of in singular and specific instances in plural:
Beautiful hair [as a total mass/collective] requires much care vs. If youfound two gray hairs [two instances/small occurrences of] onyourhead, do not panic. Wehave a solution to grays.
Most nouns that can have different meanings in singular or plural are usu- ally (and unfortunately) found in the lists of noncount nouns that are ubiqui- tous in ESL grammar texts. To avoid confusion on the part of students, some researchers (DeCarrico, 2000, p. 21) have called them "crossover" nouns; if this label is helpful to learners, there is little reason not to use it.
GERUNDS AND ABSTRACT NOMINALIZATIONS
Analyses of written and academic English corpora have demonstrated that gerunds and abstract derived nouns are very common in academic and pro- fessional texts (Bhatia, 1993). According to Biber's et al. (1999) findings, ab- stract nominalizations are encountered far more frequently in academic writing than in news reportage or fiction. On the other hand, conversa- tional discourse has the lowest rates of nominalization occurrences among all other language genre. Biber et al. explained that "academic discourse is much more concerned with abstract concepts than the other registers, espe- cially conversation" (p. 323).
Analysis of L2 text, however, shows that in academic texts advanced NNS writers employ significantly fewer gerunds and nominalizations than first-year NS students without formal training in writing (Hinkel,
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