Descripción detallada de la construcción y características de elementos

been already developed. Thus, apart from functioning as a special kind of summary device, nominalized processes help develop a textual structure that contributes to the development of the main topic of the text. When constructing a text, not only is it important to find an appropriate internal structure to sentences, but a suitable balance has to be obtained so that the text can flow and its meaning can be easily decoded. Cohesive devices, such as lexical cohesion, reference, ellipsis and conjunction, play an important role here. In this sense, nominalization can be regarded as “a special kind of lexical cohesion” (Guillén, 1998, p. 370) because it is neither a repetition of what has been said nor a synonym and, at the same time, it is a combination of both. Marinkovich (2005) and Sušinskienė (2010a, 2010b, 2012) studied the role of nominalizations as lexico-grammatical cohesive devices and listed them as cohesive devices establishing sense relations in the text, defining cohesion and coherence and ultimately contributing to discourse organization.

Based on Halliday and Hassan (1976) and Valeika (1985), she (2012, p. 132)

extended Guillén’s (1988) notion of lexical cohesion by setting four types of cohesion: a) grammatical (reference, substitution and ellipsis); b) lexicogrammatical (articles, pronouns, conjunctives, conjunctive articles, particles, modal words, quantifiers and nominalizations); c) lexico-syntactic (periphrasis and parenthesis) and lexical (lexical repetition, synonyms, antonyms, superordinates, hyponyms, meronyms, paronyms and converses)

In (32) the alternation between verbal and nominal forms is evident and it is easy to observe the degree of lexical cohesion attained by the repetition of almost identical variations of the same lexical root.

(32) When the moon is in the syzygies, her tendency to the earth is diminished by the attraction of the sun. The sun attracts both the earth and the moon, but with different forces, as one is nearer to him than the other; and as the attraction of the two bodies is mutual, whatever diminishes the attraction of the earth towards the moon, diminishes the tendency of the moon to the earth, and therefore in the conjunction and opposition of the sun and the moon, their tendencies will, by the action of the sun, be diminished. But the diminution in the syzygies is double to the augmentation in the quadratures. Had this diminution and augmentation been equal, at the octants the disturbing force of the sun would make no alteration in the moon's tendency to the earth, but as one is double to the other, the four points at which they balance each other, will be about 54°44' from the syzygies on each side.

The diminution of the moon's gravitation to the earth in the syzygies, and its augmentation in the quadratures, tends to flatten her orbit in the syzygies, and to lengthen it in the quadratures; so that her orbit, even suppose it had been circular at first, is thereby made an oval or ellipsis, having the shortest diameter in the line of the syzygies, the longest, in the center. Hence the curvature of the moon's orbit will be greatest in quadrature, and least in syzygy (Ewing, 1809, p. 501; emphasis added).

The cohesive effect is clearly seen in the first paragraph, where diminish/diminution is repeated six times under three different forms. This way, the same idea is mentioned several times but the change in form does not make the text sound repetitive.

2. Economy, conciseness and the packing of information: nominalizations allow processes to be encoded in fewer words. This propriety may be useful in cases in which the writer wants economy to prevail over other considerations (van Dijk, 2008; Ventola, 1996, p. 183). Deixis and the avoidance of redundancy may be closely related to this point. Thus, when a writer wants to refer to a process and she considers that the specification of all the information related to it is not necessary, she may resort to a nominalization instead of a finite clause (Mackenzie, 1985, p.

33). This observes the Maxim of Quantity of Grice (1975) that states that to be informative it is necessary to include the necessary information, and no more.

Apart from being more economical, nominalizations present an alternative as far as lexical density and grammatical intricacy are concerned. Nominalized processes condense lexical words and increase the grammatical intricacy with regard to their verbal counterparts (Briones, Fortuny, Sastre & Botto de Porcovi, 2003). Thus, the coding of the information through a nominal or a verbal group depends on whether the writer decides to give preference either to grammatical intricacy or to lexical density to attain a desirable amount of conciseness in the text. Nominalizations allow the possibility that two processes are included in the same clause, one as the central process expressed by the VG and the other one being converted into a nominalized Participant, as Ravelli (1988, p. 145) explained:

A ranking clause has only one process. […] However, if the process meaning is realized metaphorically as a Thing then it may function in the clause as a participant. In this way, two or more process meanings may be related within one clause, thus avoiding the clause complex systems. As a result, the ideational information of two or more clauses may be realized in one, with a correspondingly lower grammatical intricacy and higher lexical density.

Apart from pointing out the level of conciseness that a nominalization can confer to a text, Ravelli’s claim serves to outline one of the main advantages of nominalized processes: the backgrounding of information.