Morphology Commons^™

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 …

This study compares the use of native nominal affixes (-ness, -ship, -hood) with borrowed, potential affixes (-cion, -ance, -ity, -age, -ment) throughout the English portions of the multilingual (French, Latin, English) records of the London Goldsmiths and Grocers of the early fifteenth century. Attempting to locate evidence of the naturalization of these forms--the process by which these endings become derivational morphemes in the general English lexicon--the paper develops the notion of local productivity. This measure combines both quantitative and qualitative data to show that, even in smaller corpora, historical linguists can find evidence of the morphological status of different potential …