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6. FINDINGS<br />

amount of those appearing in natural science texts, which would imply a bigger difference<br />

between the normalized frequencies of the total for natural sciences and medical texts.<br />

Table 9. Overall figures for nominalizations in PPCEME, per type of text and subperiod<br />

(normalized frequencies per 10,000 words in brackets)<br />

E1<br />

E2<br />

E3 TOTAL<br />

(1500-1570) (1570-1640) (1640-1710)<br />

Natural sc. 49 (35.1) 96 (69.7) 306 (129.4) 451 (88.2)<br />

Medical texts 117 (89.6) 179 (119.5) - 296 (105.5)<br />

TOTAL 166 (61.4) 275 (95.7) 306 (129.4) 747 (94.3)<br />

What is undeniably confirmed by the data from both corpora (see Table 8 above) is<br />

that nominalizations tend to increase in frequency in the course of time. Thus, the number<br />

of nominalizations in E1 (normalized frequency: 90.5) almost doubles in E3 (normalized<br />

frequency: 173). The increase is even more noticeable if we consider Romance<br />

nominalizations (see Table 10), which in E3 show a normalized frequency of occurrence<br />

three times higher than in E1 (101.4 vs. 36.7).<br />

Table 10. Overall figures for –ing and Romance nominalizations from both corpora, per<br />

subperiod (normalized frequencies per 10,000 words in brackets)<br />

E1<br />

E2<br />

E3 TOTAL<br />

(1500-1570) (1570-1640) (1640-1710)<br />

–ing nominals 404 (53.9) 476 (61.9) 514 (71.6) 1,394 (62.3)<br />

Romance nom. 275 (36.7) 447 (58.2) 728 (101.4) 1,450 (64.8)<br />

TOTAL 679 (90.5) 923 (120.1) 1242 (173) 2,844 (127.2)<br />

A possible explanation for this fact may be that scientific English was starting to develop.<br />

It is usually said that the time when scientific English properly emerged was the late<br />

seventeenth century, when Newton used the vernacular language instead of Latin to<br />

publish his works (Banks 2008: 23). However, many other authors had been using English<br />

168

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