0 INTRODUCTION

6. FINDINGS
that authors of surgical treatises originally written in the vernacular were learned writers
with a good knowledge of Romance terms and used them following Latinate patterns of
writing.
6.3. The use of nominalizations in relation to the variation across medical genres
As pointed out in Chapter 1, attention has often been drawn to the frequent use of
nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English (Gotti 2006: 679, Banks 2008).
However, those texts typically classified as ‘scientific writing’ cannot be considered
homogeneous or ‘stationary’ (Halliday and Martin 1993: 54), due to the diversity of their
intended audiences and the different subareas of knowledge represented.
This section intends to examine whether such factors may have played a role in the
kinds of nominalizations preferred in different types of scientific texts. The starting
hypothesis is that Romance nominalizations would be more prevalent in more academic
texts, directed to a learned, professional audience, whereas native nominalizations ending
in –ing would occur more frequently in more popular texts (see Section 4.5 above). In
order to test whether the variables text type and audience have an effect on the frequency
and origin of the nominalizations employed as well as on the lexical richness of certain
types of medical texts, three categories of medical writing, each with different intended
audiences (see Bennett 1970: 141-145, Taavitsainen 2001a: 88), have been analyzed in
what follows, namely, academic treatises, surgical treatises and remedy books. Section
6.3.1 analyzes the frequency of nominalizations according to their origin and text category.
In turn, Section 6.3.2 is concerned with the variation of the bases used in the formation of
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