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6. FINDINGS<br />

path-way to knowledge, containing the first principles of<br />

geometrie)<br />

The aim of this section, therefore, is analyzing the possible structural differences<br />

between doublets that may have led to the coexistence of both kinds of nominalizations.<br />

After consulting the OED, it is clear that there is a tendency for Romance<br />

nominalizations to be used as both action and result nominals, whereas in the case of –ing<br />

nominals the stronger tendency is for them to be used only as action nouns. However, this<br />

difference cannot serve to account for the existence of the doublets considered in the<br />

current study because, as noted earlier, only action nouns have been considered here.<br />

Therefore, aspects such as chronology, frequency, and types of dependents were assessed<br />

to try to account for the coexistence of doublets.<br />

6.1.5.1. Overview of the data<br />

A total of 102 doublets were found in the corpora. Five of these are doublets formed from<br />

Romance bases to which two different Romance suffixes are added, as in<br />

continuance/continuation. However, the majority of the doublets in my data are formed<br />

from a Romance verbal base, one member showing a Romance suffix, and the other the<br />

native suffix –ing; exceptions are hindering/hindrance and stoppage/stopping, whose<br />

bases are Germanic. More specifically, one of these doublets is actually a triplet. This<br />

triplet has the native suffix –ing and the Romance –(at)ion, which is attached to two<br />

variants of the same root, giving as a result the triplet union/unition/uniting. When looking<br />

at the Romance suffixes used, five different suffixes were found, namely, –(at)ion, –ment,<br />

–ance, –age and –ure. Of these five, –(at)ion is by far the most frequent since it was used<br />

191

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