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6. FINDINGS<br />

Figure 9. Suffixes used in remedy books by time period (raw figures)<br />

This tendency can perhaps be explained in terms of audience. As claimed in<br />

Section 4.5.2.3, remedy books belong at the most popular end of the popular-learned<br />

continuum, some of their potential readers being householders or gentlewomen. They<br />

could read, but specialized terminology with a foreign origin might have been obscure to<br />

them. For this reason, authors perhaps favoured a plain style, preferring native terms over<br />

obscure foreign ones. As can be seen in instances (206) to (208) below, the<br />

nominalizations used derive from everyday verbs (cf. boil, come, burn and fret) which can<br />

be used in contexts other than the medical field, and as such the terms would have been<br />

easily understandable by the readers, relating to concepts already present in their semantic<br />

repertoire, and thus making the necessary information transfer easier. This procedure is<br />

what Gotti (2003: 56) defines as “term metaphor,” namely, a “device used in specialized<br />

discourse to create terms drawn from general language.” Furthermore, it must also be<br />

213

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