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6. FINDINGS<br />

complements of a preposition, despite the individual differences in the percentages of<br />

Romance, verbal and nominal –ing nominalizations. This syntactic preference makes them<br />

valuable tools for scientific writing as they are powerful instruments of information<br />

agglutination. The next most common options are object and subject uses, again for all<br />

kinds of nominalization.<br />

6.1.4. Productivity of the nominalizing suffixes<br />

Defining productivity has never been easy since the phenomenon is considered a mixture<br />

of different factors, including frequency, analyzability, transparency, creativity and<br />

lexicalization, among others (Dalton-Puffer 1996: 215-220). In order to establish the<br />

productivity of the suffixes analyzed in this study, both their frequency and transparency<br />

have been taken into account.<br />

Tables 13 and 14 reflect the frequency of the different suffixes; Table 13 also takes<br />

into account whether the resulting nominalizations are hybrids or not. A hybrid is here<br />

understood as in Miller’s 1997 article, that is, as a nominalization whose base and suffix<br />

have a different origin. Take, for instance, analyzing, its base being Romance and its suffix<br />

Germanic. The native –ing is the most frequent suffix in the nominalizations found in the<br />

corpus throughout the EModE period. It is used in native nominalizations, that is, those<br />

having a Germanic base (i.e. stirring, working, seeking) as well as with non-Germanic<br />

bases. The most frequent non-Germanic bases are Romance, bringing about<br />

nominalizations such as crossing or evaporating, but there are some instances of<br />

nominalizations formed from bases originally adapted from Old Norse, e.g. mistaking (ON<br />

mistaka) or raising (ON reisa). This means that the –ing suffix has transparency in the<br />

187

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