John Benjamins Publishing Company
Chapter 2. New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity
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Abstract
We study the productivity of the suffixes ‑ness and ‑ity in seventeenth‑ and eighteenth-century letters in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. We analyze the role of gender and five internal factors: etymology, the word class of the base, branching structure, semantics, and occurrence in possessive constructions. We develop statistical and visual methods that facilitate diachronic comparisons within factors and between competing suffixes; our basic measure is the proportion of types of interest out of all relevant types, and we utilize permutation testing to assess the statistical significance of our findings. Our results support and refine the earlier finding of a male-led increase in the productivity of ‑ity and provide new information on the interplay of gender and internal factors.
Abstract
We study the productivity of the suffixes ‑ness and ‑ity in seventeenth‑ and eighteenth-century letters in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence. We analyze the role of gender and five internal factors: etymology, the word class of the base, branching structure, semantics, and occurrence in possessive constructions. We develop statistical and visual methods that facilitate diachronic comparisons within factors and between competing suffixes; our basic measure is the proportion of types of interest out of all relevant types, and we utilize permutation testing to assess the statistical significance of our findings. Our results support and refine the earlier finding of a male-led increase in the productivity of ‑ity and provide new information on the interplay of gender and internal factors.
Chapters in this book
- 日本言語政策学会 / Japan Association for Language Policy. 言語政策 / Language Policy 10. 2014 i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 2. New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity 8
- Chapter 3. A corpus-based comparative acoustic analysis of target-like vowel production by L1-Japanese learners and native speakers of English 41
- Chapter 4. Digital Dickens 62
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 5. 120 years of reporting clauses 100
- Chapter 6. Establishing a ‘new normal’ 125
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 7. Syntactic segmentation of spoken corpus data 154
- Chapter 8. Short-term diachronic and variety-internal approaches to textual functionality in South Asian Englishes 192
- Chapter 9. Do corpus data on World Englishes inspire tolerance of variation in ELT professionals? 217
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 10. Query a corpus in near-natural language 248
- 日本言語政策学会 / Japan Association for Language Policy. 言語政策 / Language Policy 10. 2014 263
Chapters in this book
- 日本言語政策学会 / Japan Association for Language Policy. 言語政策 / Language Policy 10. 2014 i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 2. New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity 8
- Chapter 3. A corpus-based comparative acoustic analysis of target-like vowel production by L1-Japanese learners and native speakers of English 41
- Chapter 4. Digital Dickens 62
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 5. 120 years of reporting clauses 100
- Chapter 6. Establishing a ‘new normal’ 125
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 7. Syntactic segmentation of spoken corpus data 154
- Chapter 8. Short-term diachronic and variety-internal approaches to textual functionality in South Asian Englishes 192
- Chapter 9. Do corpus data on World Englishes inspire tolerance of variation in ELT professionals? 217
-
Crossing boundaries
- Chapter 10. Query a corpus in near-natural language 248
- 日本言語政策学会 / Japan Association for Language Policy. 言語政策 / Language Policy 10. 2014 263
