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

these Romance formations were already part of the English vocabulary in ME. It must be<br />

conceded that some of them were attested in E1 and E2, coinciding with the peak in<br />

borrowing as dated by Görlach (1991: 137) and Barber (1997 [1976]: 222). However, it is<br />

clear that the majority of these formations were adopted into English before the great<br />

lexical expansion that took place in the EModE period (Finkenstadt et al. 1970). Section<br />

6.2.2 then attempted to clarify the main method of acquisition of these words. As already<br />

noted, significant difficulties arose in distinguishing between borrowing and suffixation<br />

following Latin patterns. However, it was established that both Romance nominalizations<br />

attested in English at an earlier stage than the corresponding verbs and Romance<br />

nominalizations having no corresponding verb in English could be considered borrowings.<br />

Romance nominalizations having a Romance suffix but a native base were regarded as<br />

English coinages on Latinate patterns, and those Romance nominalizations attested later<br />

than their corresponding verbs, or attested in the same year, were considered as<br />

indeterminate. Following the analysis of the data here, it was established that most of the<br />

terms were borrowings from Latin and French. This finding is in line with those of<br />

Nevalainen (1999: 351) and Görlach (1991: 155). The scarcity of English coinages was<br />

explained by the fact that the range of environments in which a Romance suffix was<br />

allowed was somehow more restricted than those of the native –ing.<br />

Section 6.2.3 tried to assess the possible influence of translation in the adoption of<br />

Romance nominalizations. For this purpose, the normalized frequencies of these<br />

formations in translations were compared with those in texts originally written in English.<br />

It is true that the small amount of data here precludes any absolute statements. However,<br />

242

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