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Changes in Meaning and Function: Studies in historical linguistics with a focus on Spanish
Edited by Jorge Fernández Jaén and Herminia Provencio Garrigós
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 25] 2020
► pp. 1–20

Nouns and labelling

The advance of nominalization in Spanish

| Autonomous University of Madrid

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.

Keywords: nouns, verbs, labelling, nominalization
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
  • References
Published online: 2 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.25.01elv
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