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4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD<br />

rhetorical effect of the Theme is backgrounding. It refers to something that has been said<br />

previously, giving cohesion to the text. This is illustrated in the following example taken<br />

by Halliday and Martin (1993: 60-61) from Newton’s Treatise on Optiks (1704; written<br />

1675-1687).<br />

(100) a. (…) the light (…) that (…) emergeth continues ever after to be<br />

white.<br />

b. the Whiteness of the emerging Light<br />

In (100a) Newton packages information about light using a whole sentence. Later in the<br />

text, Newton packages the previous information into the NP in (100b), giving as a result<br />

what Downing (1991: 121) calls “summary nouns.” This process of packaging enables<br />

the writer to place given information at the beginning of the information unit, in subject<br />

position, whereas the new information is placed at the end, usually in longer and more<br />

complex structures. However, according to Albentosa-Hernández and Moya-Guijarro<br />

(2001: 461-462), it is often the case that nominalization also breaks the rules of<br />

communicative dynamism and the principle by which complex syntactic structures are<br />

placed at the end of the sentence. This happens because “the pressure to be precise often<br />

leads to length of and complexity within the noun phrases” (Vande Kopple 1994: 546),<br />

even if they are in the subject position.<br />

As previously said, scientific texts are rhetoric objects in the sense that they are<br />

devised to convince fellow scientists that what they are saying is true. In this task,<br />

nominalization plays an important role. As seen in Section 3.1 above, nominalization<br />

usually implies a valency reduction which eliminates some of the participants in the<br />

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