0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
obscure. However, the learned audiences of both surgical and academic treatises were far
more likely to have a sound understanding of these difficult words. Furthermore, whereas
remedy books had been written in the vernacular since OE times, surgical and academic
treatises were originally written in Latin and, once they started to be composed in the
vernacular, authors persisted in using Latin texts as models, favouring the use of Romance
formations.
Section 6.3 also revealed that Romance nominalizations increased over the EModE
period, even in remedy books, and that they were used in surgical and academic treatises
even when there was a native equivalent available. Thus, it was concluded that Romance
formations were not adopted only because of their functionality, but also for stylistic
reasons; they conveyed more connotations than native formations (Blake 1992b: 507), and
they began to be regarded as markers of scientific style.
Section 6.3.2 considered the kind of bases used in the formation of nominalizations
in the three categories of medical writing. Findings showed that lexical richness was
closely related to the intended audience. Thus, surgical and academic treatises showed the
widest variety of bases employed in the formation of nominalizations, which implies that
learned audiences could handle a richer vocabulary than popular audiences. When bases
were analyzed in terms of the suffix they combine with, it was clear that the highest
number of bases was that used with the native –ing in all categories of medical writing.
This suggests that –ing was the most productive suffix at the time. Specific bases were
more common in categories intended for learned audiences.
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