This paper tracks stylistic variation in the use of two roughly synonymous suffixes, the Romance -ity and the native -ness, during the Early Modern English period. We seek to verify from a statistical viewpoint the claims of Rodríguez-Puente (2020), who reports on a decrease of -ness in favour of -ity in registers representative of the speech-written and formal-informal continua at that time. To this end, we develop new methods of statistical and visual analysis that enable diachronic comparisons of competing processes across subcorpora, building upon an earlier method by Säily and Suomela (2009). Our results confirm that -ity gained ground first in written registers and then spread towards speech-related registers, and we are able to time this change more accurately thanks to a novel periodisation. We also provide strong statistical support indicating that the proportion of -ity was significantly higher in legal registers than in other registers.
ARCHER. (1990–1993/2002/2007/2010/2013). A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. Originally compiled under the supervision of Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (Northern Arizona University and University of Southern California). Modified and expanded by members of a consortium of universities. Current consortium members: Universities of Bamberg, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester, Michigan, Northern Arizona, Santiago de Compostela, Southern California, Trier, Uppsala, and Zurich. [URL]
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. The MIT Press.
Aronoff, M., & Anshen, F. (1998). Morphology and the lexicon: Lexicalization and productivity. In A. Spencer & A. M. Zwicky (Eds.), The Handbook of Morphology (pp. 237–247). Blackwell.
Baayen, R. H. (1989). A Corpus-based Approach to Morphological Productivity. Statistical Analysis and Psycho-linguistic Interpretation [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Free University of Amsterdam.
Baayen, R. H. (1992). Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. In G. Booij & J. Van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1991 (pp. 109–149). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Baayen, R. H. (1993). On frequency, transparency and productivity. In G. Booij & J. Van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1992 (pp. 181–208). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge University Press.
Baayen, R. H., & Renouf, A. (1996). Chronicling the Times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language,
72
(1), 69–96.
Baeskow, H. (2012). -Ness and -ity: Phonological exponents of n or meaningful nominalizers of different adjectival domains?Journal of English Linguistics,
40
(1), 6–40.
Berg, K. (2021). Productivity, vocabulary size, and new words. A response to Säily (2016). Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
17
(1), 177–187.
Biber, D. (2012). Register as a predictor of linguistic variation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
8
(1), 9–37.
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, Genre, and Style (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2016). Register variation on the searchable web: A multi-dimensional analysis. Journal of English Linguistics,
44
(2), 95–137.
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1997). Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In T. Nevalainen & L. Kahlas-Tarkka (Eds.), To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki LII, pp. 253–275). Société Néophilologique.
Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2013). Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics,
41
(2), 104–134.
Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2016). Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education.
Bolinger, D. L. (1948). On defining the morpheme. Word,
4
1, 18–23.
Cowie, C. (1998). Diachronic Word-formation: A Corpus-based Study of Derived Nominalizations in the History of English [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Cambridge.
Cowie, C., & Dalton-Puffer, C. (2002). Diachronic word-formation and studying changes in productivity over time: Theoretical and methodological considerations. In J. E. Díaz Vera (Ed.), A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics (pp. 410–437). Rodopi.
Culpeper, J., & Kytö, M. (2010). Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge University Press.
Dalton-Puffer, C. (1996). The French Influence on Middle English Morphology: A Corpus-based Study of Derivation. Mouton de Gruyter.
Degaetano-Ortlieb, S., & Teich, E. (2018). Using relative entropy for detection and analysis of periods of diachronic linguistic change. In B. Alex, S. Degaetano-Ortlieb, A. Feldman, A. Kazantseva, N. Reiter, & S. Szpakowicz (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL-2018) (ACL Anthology W18–45, pp. 22–33). Association for Computational Linguistics. [URL]
Gaeta, L., & Ricca, D. (2006). Productivity in Italian word formation: A variable-corpus approach. Linguistics,
44
(1), 57–89.
Gardner, A.-C. (2014). Derivation in Middle English: Regional and Text Type Variation (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XCII). Société Néophilologique.
Hundt, M., & Gardner, A.-C. (2017). Corpus-based approaches: Watching English change. In L. J. Brinton (Ed.), English Historical Linguistics: Approaches and Perspectives (pp. 96–130). Cambridge University Press.
Kilgarriff, A. (2005). Language is never, ever, ever, random. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
1
(2), 263–275.
Kroch, A., Santorini, B., & Delfs, L. (2004). Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME; 1st ed., release 3). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. [URL]
Kytö, M., & Culpeper, J. (2006). A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. [URL]
Lindsay, M. (2012). Rival suffixes: Synonymy, competition, and the emergence of productivity. In A. Ralli, G. Booij, S. Scalise, & A. Karasimos (Eds.), Morphology and the Architecture of Grammar: On-line Proceedings of the 8th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM8) (pp. 192–203). University of Patras.
Lindsay, M., & Aronoff, M. (2013). Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In N. Hathout, F. Montermini, & J. Tseng (Eds.), Morphology in Toulouse: Selected Proceedings of Décembrettes 7 (pp. 133–153). Lincom.
Marchand, H. (1969). The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word-formation (2nd ed.). C. H. Beck. (Original work published 1960)
McIntosh, C. (1998). The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1900: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. Cambridge University Press.
Nevalainen, T. (1999). Early Modern English lexis and semantics. In R. Lass (Ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, III: 1476–1776 (pp. 332–458). Cambridge University Press.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. [URL]
Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. Oxford University Press. [URL]
Palmer, C. C. (2009). Borrowings, Derivational Morphology, and Perceived Productivity in English, 1300–1600 [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. The University of Michigan.
Palmer, C. C. (2015). Measuring productivity diachronically: Nominal suffixes in English letters, 1400–1600. English Language and Linguistics,
19
(1), 107–129.
Plag, I. (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge University Press.
Plag, I., Dalton-Puffer, C., & Baayen, H. (1999). Morphological productivity across speech and writing. English Language and Linguistics,
3
(2), 209–228.
Riddle, E. M. (1985). A historical perspective on the productivity of the suffixes -ness and -ity. In J. Fisiak (Ed.), Historical Semantics, Historical Word-formation (pp. 435–461). Mouton de Gruyter.
Rodríguez-Puente, P. (2020). Register variation in word-formation processes: The development of -ity and -ness in Early Modern English. International Journal of English Studies,
20
(2), 147–169.
Rodríguez-Puente, P., Fanego, T., López-Couso, M. J., Méndez-Naya, B., Núñez-Pertejo, P., Blanco-García, C., & Tamaredo, I. (2018). Corpus of Historical English Law Reports 1535–1999 (CHELAR; version 2). Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization, University of Santiago de Compostela.
Rodríguez-Puente, P., Säily, T., & Suomela, J. (2022). Data for the article “New methods for analysing historical suffix competition across registers” (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo.
Romaine, S. (1985). Variability in word formation patterns and productivity in the history of English. In J. Fisiak (Ed.), Papers from the 6th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (pp. 451–465). John Benjamins.
Säily, T. (2011). Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
7
(1), 119–141.
Säily, T. (2014). Sociolinguistic Variation in English Derivational Productivity: Studies and Methods in Diachronic Corpus Linguistics. Société Néophilologique.
Säily, T. (2016). Sociolinguistic variation in morphological productivity in eighteenth-century English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory,
12
(1), 129–151.
Säily, T., & Suomela, J. (2009). Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters. In A. Renouff & A. Kehoe (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments (pp. 87–109). Rodopi.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.