Nominalisation

The Meta Model looks at the language patterns we make, which are made at the surface level (click to read) to recover the deleted information.

A Nominalisation is a process or state that has been made or spoken as a noun, a real thing.

A typical nominalised word could be "love" in the statement:-

               "Nobody loves me."

The word "love" is a process or state, and needs definition, as each of us will have a different meaning for the word love. We need to find-out what exactly does the person who is saying the sentence means by "love".

A good test to test if a word has been nominalised is to try and put the word in a wheelbarrow or a container.

Can you capture "love" into a wheelbarrow or container? No, therefore we need to chunk down, to get the real meaning of what "love" means by asking such a question as:-

            "What do you mean by the word love?" 

We will turn the nominalised word back into a verb, the process or state.

Other words as examples of nominalisations could be:- 

            "hate", "jealousy", "respect", "fun", "harmony", "depression", "tired" 

Back to Meta Model diagram (click)