0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
[t]here are good reasons why compressed, phrasal expressions are
preferred over elaborated clausal expressions in academic writing: they
are more economical; they allow for faster, more efficient reading; and
they are comprehensible to the expert reader despite the fact that some
explicit meaning is lost when fuller clauses are reduced to phrasal
structures.
To summarize, nominalizations are useful in scientific writing since they are a tool
for giving coherence to the text. Furthermore, they allow information that is usually
conveyed through a clause to be packed just in an NP. This process allows an NP to be
related to another NP or a PP, allowing the creation of a relation between processes that
enables the writer to explain the experimental processes. Furthermore, nominalization is a
perfect device to obtain the objectivity and impersonality required by academic writing.
Disadvantages such as the lack of clarity and loss of explicit meaning are avoided by the
expert reader’s knowledge on the topic.
4.1.2. Other factors favouring the use of nominalizations
The fact that the flourishing of nominalizations took place in the EModE period may be
explained by intra- as well as extralinguistic factors. As stated in Section 4.1.1 above,
nominalizations are useful for coherence. However, during the EModE period there were
also other factors that might have had an impact on the rise of nominalizations.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the linguistic situation in England was a
complex one. Besides minority Celtic languages spoken in western and northern areas,
there were three main languages, namely, Latin, French and English. Even these three
major languages were not at the same level as they were used in different registers. Latin
enjoyed a privileged position since it was used in public domains such as religion,
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