0 INTRODUCTION

5. CORPORA AND METHODOLOGY
5. CORPORA AND METHODOLOGY
In order to examine the development and use of action nominalizations in Early Modern
scientific writing I have opted for a corpus-based study, since resorting to one’s own
intuitions proves of little help in the analysis of the language of earlier periods, as noted
widely in the literature (see Svartvik 1992: 8, among many others).
In this chapter I offer information on the corpora used, the methodology employed
and the decisions taken in the classification of nominalizations in my database. More
specifically, Section 5.1 describes the corpora selected for the present study, gives the lists
of texts selected, and their number of words; issues such as text sampling are also
considered. Section 5.2 focuses on the suffixes analyzed, providing morphological and
semantic information about these; it also describes the methodology used for their retrieval
from the texts under analysis. Finally, Section 5.3 is structured in two parts. The first of
these outlines the various parameters employed in the classification of nominalizations,
namely: a) the type of constituents making up the nominalization phrase; b) the function of
this phrase in the superordinate structure; and c) its internal syntax. The second part
discusses the difficulties encountered when classifying the nominalizations in the corpora.
5.1. Corpora
As already noted, the present investigation is a corpus-based study examining action
nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English, as well as the possible influence on
their use and frequency by extralinguistic factors such as audience and text category. The
corpora selected for this purpose are the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern
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