Derived nouns: quality, collective, and other abstracts
Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, Ingo Plag · 2013
Abstract This chapter deals with affixes whose primary purpose is to derive nouns other than event/state/result nouns or personal/participant nouns. Among these are affixes that create abstract and collective nouns of various sorts, including -ness, -ity, -dom, -ship, -hood, -ery, -ia, -y, -ana,and -age. The chapter also looks at the suffix -ism, which has a more specific meaning than the purely abstract or collective-forming affixes, but which nevertheless forms nouns that denote neither events nor participants in events. The first part of the chapter summarizes the formal properties of these derived nouns while the second part focuses on semantic issues.