Nominalization in Women’s Instructive Texts, 1700-1899. Diachronic Shifts in Form and Function

Abstract

This article examines the diachronic development of nominalization in women’s instructive texts between 1700 and 1899, using evidence from the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English (CoWITE). The study compares the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subcorpora (CoWITE18, CoWITE19) to trace both quantitative changes in frequency and qualitative shifts in function. Findings show a steady increase in nominalization rates, from 11.1 to 15.2 per 10,000 words, accompanied by a morphological shift: while eighteenth-century texts relied heavily on native  formations in -ness and -ity, nineteenth-century prose displays a marked preference for Latinate suffixes such as -tion and -ment. Functionally, nominalizations are used for procedural labelling, measurement and evaluation, impersonal expression, and abstraction. Their growing use supports a move toward higher lexical density and a more authoritative, impersonal style. In Hallidayan terms, this represents an increase in grammatical metaphor, aligning women’s instructive prose with broader developments in Late Modern English toward informational density and professionalised writing.