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7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH<br />

Chapter 6 reported on the empirical work that was intended to complement Chapter<br />

3. It offered a thorough description of the use of –ing and Romance nominalizations in<br />

Early Modern scientific writing. Section 6.1 gave an overview of the evolution and use of<br />

nominalizations at the time. The corpus study indicated that both –ing and Romance<br />

nominalizations were on the rise in scientific texts. This increase in their frequency of use<br />

was more remarkable in the case of Romance nominalizations, which was explained as a<br />

result of the need for the vernacular to adapt for use in the scientific register. For example,<br />

the lack of terms related to art was overcome by the use of these formations, especially so<br />

in the case of Romance nominalizations, which were adopted from prestigious languages<br />

at the time such as French and Latin.<br />

However, other factors contributed to make nominalizations so attractive for<br />

scientific discourse in EModE times. For this reason, analyzes of their structural and<br />

syntactic properties were carried out in sections 6.1.2 and 6.2.3, respectively. The<br />

examination of structural variability in nominals revealed that the increase in the number<br />

of nominalizations did not apply to all the structural types in the same way. Thus, in the<br />

case of –ing nominalizations, the decrease of nominal formations in any type of phrase ran<br />

in parallel with an increase of verbal –ing forms, especially those having only post-head<br />

dependents (bringing the Lips of the Wound exactly together). However, Romance<br />

nominalizations were observed to behave in a different manner, and were preferred in<br />

structures having both pre- and post-head dependents. Therefore, the analysis pointed<br />

towards a possible specialization of the –ing suffix to be used in verbal nominalizations.<br />

The gap left by nominal –ing nominalizations was filled by Romance nominals.<br />

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