In an earlier blog, I discussed the notion of conscious and unconscious ideological bias and one way to spot where a writer may be trying to obscure who is ‘doing the deed’ for ideological reasons. Another way is through nominalisation, the process of transforming a verb into a noun. As I explained in the previous blog, the starting point for the branch of linguistics that I learnt about recently at the Open University is that the normal way to describe an event is to talk about an ‘actor’ acting upon something. An example could be, ‘the employer employs the employee’. So, an example of nominalisation would be to remove the verb and transform it into a noun: ‘The employment of the employee’, thereby removing the actor (employer) from the sentence.

There are lots of reasons for doing this, one of which is to pack sentences with more information, and to quantify and compare. Science writing is often packed with nouns for that reason. ‘It was raining heavily last night’ is not as precise as ‘precipitation last night exceeded 20 mm’. Transferring the ‘action’ of raining from verb to noun allows for a precise quantification of the rain.  The more complex the concept, the further away from the action we get, and the verbs used reflect this, e.g.: ‘The digitalisation of electrical infrastructure systems is expected to increase by 5% annually,’ where the verb ‘to be’ is hardly action packed. (As an aside, UK newspapers always go for action verbs in headlines, e.g. ‘Rome falls’, whereas the French nominalise, ‘the fall of Rome’. I have no idea why.)

Nevertheless, nominalisation serves to background the ‘actors’. ‘Unemployment rose by 5% in April’ is a far cry in impact from ‘employers employed 5% fewer employees in April’. The latter example shows a clear social relationship – there are those that employ and those that are employed – whereas the former makes that relationship a little bit more abstract.

The words we use are important and reveal ideological bias. Unemployment is a noun, but a word that is still related to employer, employee, etc, and hence has a social context. What, then, do we make of the word ‘worklessness’? Being in a state of worklessness seems devoid of social context completely. I found ‘worklessness’ in the 2015 UK Conservative Party manifesto. Margaret Thatcher famously said ‘there is no such thing as society’, and hence the choice of this particular noun over more common alternatives hints at the underlying ideology – that work and/or unemployment are more an individual than a societal question.