New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity : Gender and internal factors in the development of ‑ity and ‑ness, 1600–1800

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Volume Title
A3 Kirjan tai muun kokoomateoksen osa
Date
2024-10-17
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Language
en
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Studies in Corpus Linguistics ; Volume 119
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.
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Keywords
Construction Grammar, historical sociolinguistics, methodology, morphological productivity, nominal suffixes
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Citation
Säily, T, Hilpert, M & Suomela, J 2024, New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity : Gender and internal factors in the development of ‑ity and ‑ness, 1600–1800 . in Crossing Boundaries through Corpora : Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics . Studies in Corpus Linguistics, vol. 119, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 8-40 . https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.119.02sai