Action nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English

Abstract

The present dissertation, Action nominalizations in Early Modern scientific English, was conceived as a contribution to the literature on nominalizations. Its point of departure was the assertion that action nominalizations are the result of a word-formation process which aims at filling gaps in the vocabulary of a particular language, English in this case. Action nominalizations are clear cases of grammatical metaphor (Halliday 2004 [1985]), since they are nouns, but they refer to actions as verbs do. For this reason, attention is given to the evolution and use of action nominalizations in the Early Modern English period (henceforth EModE), the time which sees the greatest increase of vocabulary in the history of the English language. Given that nouns prototypically refer to objects rather than actions, the question arises as to how they behave when they denote actions, and what the consequences of this use are.