0 INTRODUCTION

2. –ING NOMINALS: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT
2. –ING NOMINALS: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT
–Ing nominals will play an important part in this dissertation, as is generally the case in
any study on English nominalizations. In Present-day English (henceforth PDE) it is
commonly agreed that –ing nominalizations can be subdivided into nominal (The
strengthening of the ties) and verbal (Strengthening the ties), according to their syntactic
features. However, during the long process of acquisition of verbal features by –ing
nominalizations, a process whose beginnings date back to ME times, the situation was not
always so clear-cut. In the case of EModE in particular, the period under discussion here,
–ing nominals showed a much higher degree of structural instability than their PDE
counterparts (see Fanego 1996, 1998, 2004a).
This chapter intends to shed some light on this transitional stage, as well as justify
why all kinds of –ing nominalizations existing during the EModE period, namely
nominal, verbal and mixed (the strengthening the ties), have been included in the study.
Section 2.1 deals in detail with the nature and features of these –ing formations. Section
2.2 traces their chronological development, while Section 2.3 analyzes the syntactic
behaviour of –ing nouns during the period under analysis. Finally, Section 2.4 contains a
brief summary.
2.1. The nature and characteristics of –ing nominals
The suffix –ing goes back to OE –ung (later –ing), used to form action nouns from verbal
bases back in OE. However, from the ME period onwards, this deverbal noun gradually
acquires verbal characteristics (Fanego 1996), sometimes making it difficult to tell apart
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