0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
class, or one grammatical structure, by another” (Halliday and Martin 1993: 79). The
English language usually codifies processes by means of verbs, participants in the action
by nouns, circumstances by adverbs or PPs, and the relations between processes are
codified by means of conjunctions. However, when a clause is turned into an NP, the
previous code is no longer valid. Thus, the NP in (96b) above refers to an action. The
same action could be reworded as in (97), following the usual codification mentioned
above.
(97) The conical space renders gravitational properties to the cosmic
strings.
As scientific writing reports mainly actions (the experiments carried out in a laboratory),
grammatical metaphor becomes a useful resource for scientific language. It enables the
writer to talk about the relation between two different processes in just one clause, the
two processes being expressed by two NPs, one at the beginning and the other at the end
of the clause, and related by a verb, which acts as a nexus indicating the relation between
the two NPs (see Section 4.1.1 below for further details).
4.1.1. The rhetorical use of nominalizations
Scientists must face the problem of telling about their findings making them appear as
concrete facts. Since these findings are usually the result of experiments carried privately
in a laboratory, 17 th century scientists thought that not only the results but also the
procedures of these experiments should be explained to all literate people. This explains
the appearance of the experimental essay, a descriptive form that gives an account of the
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