25.12.2013 Views

0 INTRODUCTION

0 INTRODUCTION

0 INTRODUCTION

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

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

had been introduced in the ME period, with those appearing in EModE being especially<br />

frequent in E1 and E2. This was taken as evidence that Romance formations may have<br />

been adopted as a whole in English and, once assimilated in the vernacular, their bases<br />

were used to create new formations from native suffixes. The most frequent element of the<br />

doublet was also usually the Romance element. This is not surprising, since Romance<br />

formations in general showed a higher token frequency than native formations (see Section<br />

6.1.4). As for their structural preferences, –ing formations appear mainly with only posthead<br />

dependents (NPs) whereas Romance formations can take both pre- and post-head<br />

dependents. It is perhaps this proximity to the verbal structure of –ing formations that<br />

made them convey a stronger sense of activity than Romance action nouns. Although close<br />

in meaning, both –ing and Romance forms could co-exist since –ing forms were mainly<br />

used to fill a gap in syntax that could not be covered by Romance formations. This very<br />

gap is the possibility of combining with NPs without the requirement of a preposition.<br />

The dramatic increase of Romance nominalizations during the EModE period, as well<br />

as the difficulties when trying to distinguish the method of acquisition (Nevalainen 1999:<br />

397), justified the necessity of Section 6.2. This section sought to analyze how these<br />

formations became part of the English language, as well as to clarify the factors that might<br />

have favoured them becoming part of the vernacular. With these aims in mind, variables<br />

such as their bases and the chronology of their formation were taken into account.<br />

Hence, Section 6.2.1 established the earliest attestations of these formations by<br />

using the OED and the MED. If a particular form was attested earlier in my corpora than in<br />

these two sources, then this prior date was naturally the one taken into consideration. Data<br />

from this section has clarified that, contrary to what might have been expected, most of<br />

241

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!