中式英语之鉴3

Violet

The Noun Plague: When Language Becomes a Prison for Thought
        I was struck by Joan Pinkham’s concept of the "noun plague"—a phenomenon where Chinese learners of English tend to pile up nouns, turning lively ideas into rigid nominal structures. This is far more than a grammatical quirk; it reflects a fundamental difference in cognitive patterns. When we mechanically translate "促进经济发展" as "promote the development of the economy" instead of the more idiomatic "develop the economy," what we reveal is not just unfamiliarity with English usage but a deeper constraint: thought trapped in nominalization.
The noun plague is, at its core, the reification of thought. In Chinese thinking, we habitually transform dynamic processes into static concepts, turning verbal expressions into noun-heavy constructions. While this may flow naturally in Chinese, directly transplanting it into English results in clumsy phrasing. For example, "进行改革" becomes "carry out the reform of," whereas native English speakers would simply say "reform." This divergence stems from differing cognitive approaches: Chinese tends to conceptualize actions and solidify events into entities, while English prefers to preserve the dynamism of actions themselves.
        This nominalization tendency is especially pronounced in academic writing, creating a vicious cycle of "academese." Scholars seem to believe that the more they compress ideas into abstract nouns, the more "scholarly" and "profound" their writing appears. Thus, "we analyzed the data" becomes "an analysis of the data was conducted by us," and "they studied the phenomenon" morphs into "a study of this phenomenon has been completed by them." Such expressions are not only wordy but also suffocate the immediacy and vitality of thought within layers of abstraction. The noun plague thus becomes a prison for ideas, locking fresh insights in a labyrinth of concepts.
        Noun clusters don’t just create stylistic issues—they hinder comprehension. When readers encounter phrases like "the establishment of the standardization of the procedure for the evaluation of the performance," cognitive load skyrockets. English inherently favors a linear "subject-verb-object" thought flow, but the noun plague disrupts this natural rhythm, forcing readers to reconstruct logic between multiple abstract concepts. Pinkham’s advice to break down nominalizations into verb-driven clauses is precisely an effort to restore clarity in English expression.
Confusion between pronouns and their antecedents is a ripple effect of the noun plague. When Chinese English overstuffs sentences with nouns, writers often overuse pronouns to avoid repetition, leading to ambiguous references. For example: "The government’s adjustment of the policy and its impact on its implementation..."—here, the three "its" make it unclear what refers to what. This messiness reflects a breakdown in logical coherence: when basic expression units are overly complex, the internal logic of language becomes hard to sustain.