0 INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONCEPT OF NOMINALIZATION
1.4. Summary
This chapter has dealt with the definition of nominalization as well as with the difficulties
to adequately categorize it. As we have seen, the concept of nominalization itself has
broadened its use across time. Thus, from the syntactic process described in Lees’ (1968
[1960]) it has evolved to a word-formation process in Bauer and Huddleston (2002) and
to the nouns resulting from both processes. As already mentioned, the classical theory of
categories proves inadequate for the classification of action nominalizations since they
are not prototypical nouns in that they refer to actions or events. Nominalizations are the
result of a category shift, in the sense of Croft (1988, 1991), and for this reason their
morphology reflects their ambivalence by showing both nominal and verbal features. In
fact, there is a continuum of nominal constructions, ranging from the most nominal to the
most verbal nominalizations.
This fuzzy nature of nominalizations has always attracted the attention of
linguists. Thus, studies on nominalizations range from those mainly theoretical, based on
the author’s intuitions about language (cf. Chomsky 1964, 1970) to corpus-based studies
which analyze nominalizations in a particular context (cf. Downing 2000; Cowie 2000,
among others). However, there is no comprehensive study to date that analyze the use and
frequency of nominalizations at such an interesting period as Early Modern English, a
period characterized by impressively large additions to the lexicon and important
scientific developments at all levels. The present dissertation, which examines the intraand
extralinguistic factors accounting for the expansion of nominalizations in scientific
writing, is therefore amply justified.
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