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Measuring productivity diachronically: nominal suffixes in English letters, 1400–16001

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2014

CHRIS C. PALMER
CHRIS C. PALMER*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Kennesaw State University, 1000 Chastain Road, MD 2701, Kennesaw, Georgia 30144, [email protected]
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Abstract

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such as hapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay & Baayen (2002) – to provide quantitative and qualitative descriptions of changes in the productivity of native -ness and borrowed -ity, -cion, -age and -ment in Early Modern English. Ultimately, the study argues that diachronic productivity is best evaluated with a multifactor analysis, including measures of suffixal decomposability, aggregation of new derivatives and evidence of hybridization. It also suggests that increased use of neologisms with borrowed suffixes in Early Modern English might be explained by the increasing transparency of these suffixes in derivatives during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 107 - 129
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Anne Curzan, ELL's editors and their anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided thoughtful critique and advice for improving my discussion of historical morphology and productivity. A different perspective on the data in this article, with an emphasis on the effect of register on derivational use and change, appears in my unpublished dissertation, Palmer (2009: 257–326).

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