0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
such as audience and writing tradition have an impact on the use of nominalizations in
scientific writing. It would also be interesting in light of this to work with a corpus of texts
from several authors containing both scientific published texts and private letters to peers,
as a means of seeing whether register influences the use of nominalizations.
Finally, certain findings from the study have suggested that authors used previous
scientific texts as a model, drawing from these a general sense of the tone and character of
scientific writing. Thus, it would be interesting to consider in detail the homogenizing
power of the Philosophical Transactions, since many authors wrote their articles for
publication here. Hence, not only was the validity of an author’s experiments being
presented for approval by their peers, but also the way in which the work itself was
reported. Scientific writing, indeed, needed to satisfy the taste of the editors simply in
order to be published.
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