0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
seen as a feature of scientific writing, all members of the scientific community would be
likely to use them in their texts. They would also use a kind of register that the audience
they had in mind would understand, although it is also true that audience and readership
did not always coincide. Finally, Section 4.5 was devoted to medical texts and the
categories of writing therein. The field of medicine in EModE was more heterogeneous
and less clearly defined than nowadays. However, the different kinds of medical writings
were perfectly delimited, and ranged from most popular to most academic. In Chapter 6 of
this dissertation, remedy books, surgical treatises and academic treatises have been
analyzed in detail, with findings showing differences in the use, origin and frequency of
nominalizations in these three types of texts (see Section 6.3). Remedy books belonged to
the vernacular tradition and were intended for a wider audience, read not only by doctors
but also by the middle classes. Surgical treatises, in turn, were learned texts compiled by
doctors and used mainly by surgeons and trainee surgeons. However, since their use was
mainly practical, they were not considered to be learned works. By contrast, academic
treatises were used to teach at universities, and sometimes dealt with very specific topics;
thus, their audience was learned and specialized.
Chapter 5 described the methodology followed in this dissertation. In order to
analyze the behaviour and frequency of nominalizations in Early Modern scientific
writing, and their possible variation according to writing tradition and audience, two
corpora were selected, the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English and
Early Modern English Medical Texts. The latter contains a selection of medical texts
covering the whole picture of medical writing at the time, from the most popular to the
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