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Competition in Word-Formation
Edited by Alexandra Bagasheva, Akiko Nagano and Vincent Renner
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 284] 2024
► pp. 72–103

Chapter 3
Actional nominalization in Present-Day English in the light of the Referenced Index of Competition

ORCID logo | University of Granada

The suffix ‑ment is a nominalizer which has been portrayed as practically “defunct” (Anshen & Aronoff 1999: 24), although recent coinages cast doubts on conclusive statements (Bauer et al. 2013). This investigation is based on nonce formations from the BNC and COCA and aims at exploring nominalizations which compete for the meaning action in order to understand the current degree of productivity of the processes involved. This is done through a corpus-based quantitative approach which considers ‑ment in the light of its relationship to other competitors, e.g. ‑ing or conversion. The results reveal that ‑ment is normally surpassed by other processes, but also that it has found a niche of application which secures a minimal productive status.

Keywords: competition, corpus-based, English, nominalization, productivity, suffixation, word-formation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Competition, productivity and nominalization
    • 3.1Morphological competition
    • 3.2The synchronic status of -ment
  • 4.The environment of competition in English nominalization
    • 4.1The Referenced Index of Competition
    • 4.2An assessment of cluster competition through C*
    • 4.3General trends and particularities
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 8 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.284.03fer
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