0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
most academic, which made it possible to work on the variables of writing tradition and
audience.
Section 5.1.3 was devoted to text sampling. With PPCEME, only the texts
belonging to the genres Science/Medicine and Science (Other) from the Helsinki and Penn
1 parts of the corpus were selected. As for EMEMT, a selection of texts from the categories
Remedy books, Surgical treatises and Academic treatises were chosen. All these texts were
taken into account in calculating the frequency of nominalizations and analyzing the kinds
of dependents they took in the EModE period. However, in order to look at the influence
of factors such as audience and writing tradition, only the texts from EMEMT were used.
As for the number of texts analyzed, a previous pilot study looking at the frequency
of nominalizations in scientific texts was carried out as a means of establishing the number
of words required in our corpus. The study showed that the frequency of nominalizations
in scientific writing was high, and thus the number of words scanned was set at c. 250,000.
Section 5.2 was devoted to the description of the suffixes analyzed in this study
from a semantic and morphological point of view. The suffixes –ing, –(at)ion, –ment,
–ance, –age, –ure and –al have been catalogued as the most frequent to create action
nouns in EModE (cf. Nevalainen 1999, Banks 2003). These suffixes were also employed
to identify nominalizations in texts here, using the WordSmith 3.0 Concordance. The use
of this corpus tool meant that data retrieval was greatly simplified. However, it also
produced false hits that needed to be discarded manually.
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