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Comparative and Historical Linguistics

Derivational Morphology

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Full-Text Articles in Morphology

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer Feb 2015

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

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 …

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Historical Sociolinguistic Approaches To Derivational Morphology: A Study Of Speaker Gender And Nominal Suffixes In Early Modern English, Chris C. Palmer Dec 2012

Historical Sociolinguistic Approaches To Derivational Morphology: A Study Of Speaker Gender And Nominal Suffixes In Early Modern English, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Sociolinguistic variables, such as gender, help nuance historical claims about language change by identifying which subsets of speakers either lead or lag in the use of different linguistic variants. But at present, scholars of historical sociolinguistics have focused primarily on syntax and inflectional morphology, often leaving derivational morphology unexplored. To fill this gap in part, this paper presents a case study of men’s and women’s use of five different nominal suffixes- ‑ness, ‑ity, -age, -ment, and –cion- within the fifteenth and sixteenth century portions of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. This study finds that men led women in the …

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