0 INTRODUCTION

6. FINDINGS
Figure 6. Frequency of Romance nominalizations according to syntactic function
A possible reason for the lower use of –ing nominalizations functioning as subjects,
objects and predicatives if compared to Romance nominalizations is the fact that most –ing
nominalizations found in my data have only post-head dependents. As Fanego (2006,
2007) has pointed out, verbal –ing nominalizations having only post-head dependents
became available as subjects, objects and predicatives only in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, except for a few scattered earlier instances. In other words, verbal
–ing formations are rarely used in those positions until the middle of the period under
analysis here, and thus are rarely recorded in my data.
However, the most powerful reason for the lower frequency of nominalizations in the
syntactic positions mentioned above is that both –ing formations and Romance
nominalizations appear overwhelmingly as complements of a preposition (997 of all –ing
nominalizations [72% of the total]; and 814 of all Romance nominalizations [56% of the
total]) (see Figures 5 and 6 above). If verbal –ing formations are considered in isolation,
their preference for being used as obliques is much stronger (363 verbal formations [98.6%
of the total]). Ultimately, as Houston (1989: 176) and Fanego (1996) note, the frequency
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