0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
whole deductive process, reporting the experiments, procedures and results obtained
(Gotti 2003: 225).
As Halliday and Martin (1993: 81) put it, the kind of language used in science should
proceed step by step, with a constant movement from “this is what we
have established so far” to “this is what follows from it next”; and each
of these two parts, both the “taken for granted” part and the new
information, had to be presented in a way that would make its status in
the argument clear.
Similarly, Vande Kopple (1994: 550) recognizes this “step by step” description of
actions in writing science, and describes the way information is distributed in clauses and
sentences as follows:
What the scientists do is to take information about steps in their
experimental procedure that they apparently do not consider worthy of
expressing in a separate sentence or clause and encapsulate that
information in nominalizations that they include within the subjects of
their sentences.
It is thus at this point when nominalizations appear as a useful rhetorical device. As
Halliday and Martin (1993: 39) point out, “nominalization opens up a vast potential for
distributing and redistributing information in the clause.” Similarly, Martin (1992: 490)
considers grammatical metaphor as “the key to understanding text in context – to
contextualizing the ineffable.” By the process of nominalization, verbs referring to
processes become nouns. This means that a complex phenomenon is packaged into just
one element of the clause, in this case, an NP which can be increasingly more complex
depending on the amount of pre- and post-modifiers attached to it. As Varantola (1984: 1)
recognizes, “[n]oun phrases are a powerful syntactic device. (…) A noun phrase can
incorporate a great deal of information in a compact, synthesized form.” This packaging
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