0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
This dissertation was conceived as a contribution to the literature on nominalizations. Its
point of departure was the assertion that action nominalizations are the result of a wordformation
process which aims at filling gaps in the vocabulary of a particular language,
English in this case. Action nominalizations are clear cases of grammatical metaphor
(Halliday 2004 [1985]), since they are nouns, but they refer to actions as verbs do. For this
reason, attention was given to the evolution and use of action nominalizations in the
EModE period, the time which saw the greatest increase of vocabulary in the history of the
English language. Given that nouns prototypically refer to objects rather than actions, the
question arises as to how they behave when they denote actions, and what the
consequences of this use are. What follows is a summary of the dissertation, following the
original order of the chapters.
Chapter 1 determined the object of study, that is, action nominalizations, and
provided a definition of the term (Section 1.1). In Section 1.2 the problems in the
categorization of action nouns are discussed, given that they are not prototypical nouns in
that they do not refer to objects. After an overview of the main views on categories (the
classical and prototype approaches) in Section 1.2.1, Section 1.2.2 analyzed the efficiency
of criteria such as morphology, semantics, syntax and discourse role in the classification of
lexical items into a particular category, looking especially at discourse role and how
arguments are codified in the discourse. Section 1.2.3 seeks to present nominalization
within the phenomenon of category shift. Finally, in Section 1.2.4 it is argued that the
phenomenon of nominalization is difficult to encode in a rigid theory of categorization
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