0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
nominalizations as instances of grammatical metaphor, as proposed by Halliday (2004
[1985]), Halliday and Martin (1993) and Banks (2008). Grammatical metaphor has two
consequences. Firstly, a process, encoded as a noun, can be used in the syntactic positions
which a noun can occupy. Secondly, the process acquires some of the semantic properties
of the noun (persistence in time). Section 1.3.6 is devoted to the cognitive-functional
approach proposed by Heyvaert (2003) and her use of the concept of agnation to account
for the relation between nominalizations and the clauses they are derived from. Finally, in
Section 1.3.7 different studies are discussed, such as Albentosa-Hernández and Moya-
Guijarro (2001) and Andersen (2007), in which nominalizations are analyzed in context,
that is, their use in particular kinds of text is assessed.
Chapter 2 focused on –ing nominals and provided a thorough analysis of their
origins and distinctive features in the EModE period. As a point of departure, Section 2.1
clarified the origins of –ing formations. Thus, back in OE the –ing suffix was used to
create action nouns from verbal bases. However, over the course of time these formations
have been acquiring verbal syntactic features, a fact that has led to the coexistence of the
two kinds of –ing nominals above mentioned. The chronology of their formation was the
focus of Section 2.2. Here it was made clear, although not discussed exhaustively, that the
English (verbal) gerund construction became available in ME. Section 2.3 goes on to
describe the structural instability of –ing formations during the EModE period; at this
point, then, not only did nominal and verbal –ing forms coexist, but also mixed forms of
the kind God’s sending his onely Son and the abolishing the whole Hierarchy in that
Kingdome. These mixed –ing formations were the result of a non-uniform verbalization
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