0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
administration and scholarship. It was also the preferred language for the writing of
science. As Latin, French was used in the public domain, but also in the private one, for
the communication among the French-speaking members of the community and
marginally used in the writing of science. English was the less prestigious language and
was confined to be used orally in the domestic domain (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004: 9).
It was not until the 14 th and 15 th centuries when the increase of scientific texts in the
vernacular becomes noticeable. Although written in English, they were influenced by
Latin conventions (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004: 1) as a consequence of the former
privileged position of Latin. However, writers who used English in their scientific
writings had to face some difficulties. The most evident was the lack of specialized
terminology. Up to that stage, English had been restricted to the private sphere and had
not required technical terms that were available in Latin or French. Thus, scientific
writers had to make the English language eloquent and suitable for the transmission of
scientific knowledge (see Section 4.3 below for further details).
In order to increase the vocabulary of a language, there are two main options. On the
one hand, one can use the resources offered by the language itself. Thus, word-formation
processes, such as affixation or compounding, create new words from items already
existing in the language. On the other hand, words can be directly borrowed from other
languages. In the case of English, nominalizations helped to cover the gap that existed in
the scientific vocabulary at that time. As already mentioned in Chapter 1, in this study the
term nominalization is used in a narrow sense, to designate a word-formation process
through which nouns are created by suffixation from verbal bases. During the EModE
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