Productivity in Morphological Negation: a corpus-based approach
Victoria Hulse · Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) · 2011
This thesis investigates morphological productivity, which is among one of the most contentious issues in the field of Linguistics (Aronoff, 1976;Plag, 1999;Bauer, 2001).The advent of electronic corpora sparked fresh interest in productivity, notably the highly innovative measures proposed by Baayen and his co-writers (Baayen, 1989;Baayen and Lieber, 1991;Baayen and Renouf, 1996) which advocate the use of hapax legomena (once-occurring words in a corpus).This research reinvestigates these methods to pinpoint the degree to which hapaxes represent new words of the language and, therefore, are valid indicators of productivity.The study also develops a more fine-grained method for measuring productivity, based on the re-analysis of the previously-tried methodologies.The case study for this research is negative prefixation.A database of all negativelyprefixed words in the British National Corpus is created and relevant variables, such as types, tokens and hapaxes, are examined to determine which combination provides the most pertinent measure.The thesis also comments on the relative productivity of the negative prefixes and therefore considers appropriate historical and semantic factors.