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New approaches to investigating change in derivational productivity. Gender and internal factors in the development of ‑ity and ‑ness, 1600–1800.
Auteur(s)
Date de parution
2024
In
Crossing Boundaries through Corpora : Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics / Ed. by Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan, Theresa Neumaier, Andreas Weilinghoff and Lisa Westermayer
De la page
8
A la page
40
Résumé
<jats:p>We study the productivity of the suffixes ‑<jats:italic>ness</jats:italic> and ‑<jats:italic>ity</jats:italic> in seventeenth‑ and eighteenth-century letters in the <jats:italic>Corpora of Early English Correspondence</jats:italic>. 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 ‑<jats:italic>ity</jats:italic> and provide new information on the interplay of gender and internal factors.</jats:p>
Identifiants
Type de publication
book part
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