0 INTRODUCTION

6. FINDINGS
6. FINDINGS
This chapter presents the main findings from the corpus study. Section 6.1 gives an
overview of the use of nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English. Emphasis is put
on factors such as the frequency of –ing and Romance nominalizations in the different
subperiods, their structural types as well as their syntactic function. Furthermore, the
productivity of the different suffixes employed is also analyzed. Section 6.2 describes how
Romance nominalizations became part of the English language, paying special attention to
the various factors that might have fostered their use in EModE. Section 6.3 focuses on the
differences in use and origin of the nominalizations employed in various categories of
medical writing. Finally, Section 6.4 summarizes the main findings.
6.1. Use and distribution of nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English
This section offers an overview of how nominalizations were used during the EModE
period. Aspects such as their frequency in texts, the kinds of complements they can take
and the syntactic position they usually occupy are analyzed in what follows.
6.1.1. Frequency of nominalizations in the EModE period
As is well-known, nominalizations are one of the characteristics of scientific English.
Therefore, a priori, their frequency is expected to be high in scientific texts. If attention is
paid to examples (143) and (144) below, we see that the number of action nouns, both of
native and Romance origin, is very high. They are used to describe the different steps
followed in experiments, as in the case of Boyle’s text in (144), as well as the details of the
remedies used in medical texts (cf. [145]).
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