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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 …

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 …