Nouns and labelling
The advance of nominalization in Spanish
Beyond its communicative function, language plays a key
role in the labelling of things and events of reality, which has significant
cognitive effects. Whereas the verb performs an essentially predicative
function, the labelling task is carried out by the noun and is the reason
why nouns are the essential protagonists in science and doctrinal texts of
all ages. This very fact allows us to understand that nominalization is
especially abundant in these types of texts. This paper proposes (or “uses”)
an historical approach to the increasing extension of the processes of
nominalization of verbs and adjectives through a survey of some of the
tables of contents of science books from Renaissance times.
Article outline
- 1.Noun vs. verb: Asymmetric categories
- 2.Cognitive effects of labelling
- a.Development and acquisition of concepts
- b.Reformatting representations and cognitive availability
- c.Meta-representation
- 3.Nominalization
- 4.The advance nominalization in the past
- 5.The Latin precedents: Isidore of Seville
- 6.Concluding remarks
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References