Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations
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Tanja Säily
Abstract
The first aim of this work is to examine gender-based variation in the productivity of the nominal suffixes -ness and -ity in present-day British English. Possible interpretations are presented for the findings that -ity is used less productively by women, while with -ness there is no gender difference. The second aim is to analyse the validity of hapax-based measures of productivity in sociolinguistic research. It is discovered that they require a significantly larger corpus than type-based ones, and that the category-conditioned degree of productivity P is unusable when comparing subcorpora based on social groups. Otherwise, hapax legomena remain a theoretically well-founded component of productivity measures.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic inquiry: Introduction to special issue
- The Logic of comparability: On genres and phonetic variation in a project on language change in real time
- The MAONZE project: Changing uses of an indigenous language database
- Quotations across the generations: A multivariate analysis of speech and thought introducers across 5 decades of Tyneside speech
- A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English
- Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations
- Finding a balance: The Carolinas Conversation Collection
- Safe harbour: Ethics and accessibility in sociolinguistic corpus building
Articles in the same Issue
- Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic inquiry: Introduction to special issue
- The Logic of comparability: On genres and phonetic variation in a project on language change in real time
- The MAONZE project: Changing uses of an indigenous language database
- Quotations across the generations: A multivariate analysis of speech and thought introducers across 5 decades of Tyneside speech
- A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English
- Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations
- Finding a balance: The Carolinas Conversation Collection
- Safe harbour: Ethics and accessibility in sociolinguistic corpus building
