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Morphology Commons

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Comparative and Historical Linguistics

Middle English

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Full-Text Articles in Morphology

Base And Suffix Paradigms: Qualitative Evidence Of Emergent Borrowed Suffixes In Multiple Late Middle And Early Modern English Registers, Chris C. Palmer Dec 2010

Base And Suffix Paradigms: Qualitative Evidence Of Emergent Borrowed Suffixes In Multiple Late Middle And Early Modern English Registers, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Even though many studies of historical morphology have described trends and changes in
the productivity of borrowed suffixes in English, such as -able, -age, -ance, -ity, -cion,
-ment and -ous, few studies have been able to illustrate how borrowed suffixes initially
came to be perceived by speakers as independent, productive units. This study aims to
identify and analyze two types of textual evidence – so-called base paradigms and suffix
paradigms – to demonstrate how and when English writers and readers might have
perceived the endings of borrowings as analyzable, detachable suffixes. Textual examples
are selected from a variety of …


Borrowed Derivational Morphology In Late Middle English: A Study Of The Records Of The London Grocers And Goldsmiths Dec 2007

Borrowed Derivational Morphology In Late Middle English: A Study Of The Records Of The London Grocers And Goldsmiths

Chris C. Palmer

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 …