Abstract
This paper seeks to contribute to the study of the vernacularisation process in late Middle English by measuring up to what an extent concrete and abstract noun suffixes (in line with Dalton-Puffer 1996) attach to either Germanic or Romance bases in the medical texts extracted from the MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts) corpus. The findings obtained have been further described according to text type or genre and to target audience/readership. The description of these suffixes in relation to all the parameters already mentioned has confirmed the predominance of abstract suffixes of Romance origin although Germanic abstract suffixes are also abundant. More hybrid formations have been found with Germanic noun suffixes than with Romance ones which might be indicative of their versatility towards vernacularisation.
Highlights
1 Introduction The aim of this paper is to explore the occurrence and productivity of noun1 suffixes in medieval medical texts, as a means of verifying the level of vernacularisation of "science"2 at the time of the birth of English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
This relative balance seems to point to a regular vernacularisation process that is playing a part in the proto-scientific discourse of late Middle English
In principle this finding helps to confirm the relevance of native resources in particular domains of English, but further scrutiny of concrete noun suffixes and a more detailed study of hybrid formations would be necessary in order to arrive at more conclusive results
Summary
The aim of this paper is to explore the occurrence and productivity of noun suffixes in medieval medical texts, as a means of verifying the level of vernacularisation of "science" at the time of the birth of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Still under Latin dominance, begins to operate as a language for the transmission of specific content In this way, it will come to be coloured by new coinages, specialisation of meaning (cf Gotti 2011; Crespo 2011), metonymy, changes of material culture (cf Görlach 2003) and word formation processes. It is my intention to ascertain whether the genre of the text and, the type of addressee, leads the author to modify his morphological strategies (native/foreign bases combined with native/foreign suffixes) in the use of derivation. To this end, the paper will be divided into four different sections.
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