Glossary (Version 8.4)

ways of making sense of the past based on a selection of events. There are different types of narratives such as accounts of the past that relate a story (for example personal, fictitious) and historical recounts (such as the course of events during the Second World War)

process for forming nouns from verbs (for example, 'reaction' from 'react' or 'departure' from 'depart') or adjectives (for example, 'length' from 'long', 'eagerness' from 'eager'). Nominalisation is also a process for forming noun groups/phrases from clauses (for example, 'their destruction of the city' from 'they destroyed the city'). Nominalisation is a way of making a text more compact and is often a feature of texts that contain abstract ideas and concepts.

a word class that includes all words denoting physical objects such as 'man', 'woman', 'boy', 'girl', 'diamond', 'car', 'window' etc. These are called 'concrete nouns'. 'Abstract nouns' express intangibles such as 'democracy', 'courage', 'success', 'fact', 'idea'.