Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T13:31:02.883Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Analogy in suffix rivalry: the case of English -ity and -ness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2014

SABINE ARNDT-LAPPE*
Affiliation:
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik/Englische Sprachwissenschaft, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, [email protected]

Abstract

Rivalry between the two English nominalising suffixes -ity and -ness has long been an issue in the literature on English word-formation (see esp. Marchand 1969; Aronoff 1976; Anshen & Aronoff 1981; Romaine 1983; Riddle 1985; Giegerich 1999; Plag 2003; Säily 2011; Baeskow 2012; Lindsay 2012; Bauer et al. 2013: ch. 12). Both regularly attach to adjectival bases, producing nouns with (mostly) synonymous meanings. Most standard accounts assume that stronger restrictiveness of -ity is an effect of -ity being less productive than -ness, and that the observed preferences are an effect of selectional restrictions imposed on bases and/or suffixes. The focus of the present study is on the productivity of the two suffixes in synchronic English and on the diachronic development of that productivity in the recent history of the language. The article presents a statistical analysis and a computational simulation with an analogical model (using the AM algorithm, Skousen & Stanford 2007) of the distribution of -ity and -ness in a corpus comprising some 2,700 neologisms from the Oxford English Dictionary from three different centuries (the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth). Statistical analysis of the OED data reveals that -ity preference for pertinent bases is far more widespread than hitherto thought. Furthermore, the earlier data show a consistent development of these preference patterns over time. Computational modelling shows that AM is highly successful in predicting the variation in synchronic English as well as in the diachronic data solely on the basis of the formal properties of the bases of nominalisation. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the AM model it is shown that, unlike many previous approaches, an analogical theory of word-formation provides a convincing account of the observed differences between the productivity profiles of the two nominalising suffixes and their emergence over time.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Albright, Adam. 2009. Modeling analogy as probabilistic grammar. In Blevins, James P. & Blevins, Juliette (eds.), Analogy in grammar, 185213. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam & Hayes, Bruce. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study. Cognition 90, 119–61.Google Scholar
Anshen, Frank & Aronoff, Mark. 1981. Morphological productivity and phonological transparency. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 26, 6372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anshen, Frank & Aronoff, Mark. 1988. Producing morphologically complex words. Linguistics 26, 641–55.Google Scholar
Anshen, Frank & Aronoff, Mark. 1999. Using dictionaries to study the mental lexicon. Brain and Language 68, 1626.Google Scholar
Anttila, Raimo. 2003. Analogy: The warp and woof of cognition. In Joseph, Brian D. & Janda, Richard D. (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 425–40. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Arndt-Lappe, Sabine. In press. Word-formation and analogy. In Müller, Peter O., Ohnheiser, Ingeborg, Olsen, Susan & Rainer, Franz (eds.), Word-formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Arndt-Lappe, Sabine & Bell, Melanie. 2014. Analogy and the nature of linguistic generalisation: Locality, generality, and variability in English compound stress. MS Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and Anglia Ruskin University. Available from www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/anglistik3/arndt-lappe/publications_arndt_lappe/.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Austin, Peter C. & Steyerberg, Ewout W.. 2012. Interpreting the concordance statistic of a logistic regression model: Relation to the variance and odds ratio of a continuous explanatory variable. BMC Medical Research Methodology 12, 82.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald R. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald R. & Neijt, Anneke. 1997. Productivity in context: A case study of a Dutch suffix. Linguistics 35 (3), 565–87.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald R. & Renouf, Antoinette. 1996. Chronicling the times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72 (1), 6996.Google Scholar
Baeskow, Heike. 2012. -ness and -ity: Phonological exponents of n or meaningful nominalizers of different adjectival domains? Journal of English Linguistics 40 (1), 640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2001. Morphological productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo. 2013. English morphology: A reference guide to contemporary English word-formation and inflection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2004. English in modern times: 1700–1945. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2012. Periods: Late Modern English. In Bergs, Alexander & Brinton, Laurel J. (eds.), English historical linguistics, 6378. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Becker, Thomas. 1990. Analogie und morphologische Theorie (Studien zur theoretischen Linguistik). Munich: Fink.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2012. The architecture of grammar and the division of labour in exponence. In Trommer, Jochen (ed.), The phonology and morphology of exponence: The state of the art, 883. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo & McMahon, April M.. 2006. English phonology and morphology. In Aarts, Bas & McMahon, April M. (eds.), The handbook of English linguistics, 382410. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Moder, Carol L.. 1983. Morphological classes as natural categories. Language 59, 251–70.Google Scholar
Chandler, Steve. 2010. The English past tense: Analogy redux. Cognitive Linguistics 21 (3). 371417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapman, Don & Skousen, Royal. 2005. Analogical Modeling and morphological change: The case of the adjectival negative prefix in English. English Language and Linguistics 9 (2), 333–57.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Csardi, Gábor & Nepusz, Tamás. 2006. The igraph software package for complex network research. InterJournal, Complex Systems 1695. http://igraph.orgGoogle Scholar
Daelemans, Walter & van denBosch, Antal. 2005. Memory-based language processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Daelemans, Walter, Zavrel, Jakub, van derSloot, Ko & van denBosch, Antal. 1999–. TiMBL: Tilburg Memory Based Learner. Available from http://ilk.uvt.nl/timbl/.Google Scholar
Derwing, Bruce I. & Skousen, Royal. 1989. Morphology in the mental lexicon: A new look at analogy. In Booij, Geert & van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1989, 5571. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Derwing, Bruce I. & Skousen, Royal. 1994. Productivity and the English past tense: Testing Skousen's analogical model. In Lima, Susan D., Corrigan, Roberta & Iverson, Gregory K. (eds.), The reality of linguistic rules, 193218. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Dietz, Klaus. In press. 108. Historical word-formation in English. In Müller, Peter O., Ohnheiser, Ingeborg, Olsen, Susan & Rainer, Franz (eds.), Word-formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Dossena, Marina. 2012. 55 Late Modern English: Semantics and lexicon. In Bergs, Alexander & Brinton, Laurel J. (eds.), English historical linguistics, 887900. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Eddington, David. 2000. Analogy and the dual-route model of morphology. Lingua 110, 281–98.Google Scholar
Eddington, David. 2002. Spanish diminutive formation without rules or constraints. Linguistics 40 (2), 395419.Google Scholar
Eddington, David. 2006. Look Ma, no rules: Applying Skousen's analogical approach to Spanish nominals in -ión. In Wiebe, Grace, Libben, Gary, Priestly, Tom, Smyth, Ron & Wang, H. S. (eds.), Phonology, morphology, and the empirical imperative: Papers in honour of Bruce L. Derwing, 371407. Taipei: Crane.Google Scholar
Embick, David & Marantz, Alec. 2008. Architecture and blocking. Linguistic Inquiry 39 (1), 153.Google Scholar
Fabb, Nigel. 1988. English suffixation is constrained only by selectional restrictions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6 (4), 527–39.Google Scholar
Fruchterman, Thomas M. J. & Reingold, Edward M.. 1991. Graph drawing by force-directed placement. Journal of Software: Practice and Experience (21), 1129–64.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne & Yu, Alan C. L. (eds.) 2006. Exemplar-based models in linguistics, special issue of Linguistic Review 23(3).Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz. 1999. Lexical strata in English: Morphological causes, phonological effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guz, Wojciech. 2009. English affixal nominalizations across language registers. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45 (4), 447–71.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer. 2001. Lexical frequency in morphology: Is everything relative? Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences 39 (6), 1041–70.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer. 2003. Causes and consequences of word structure. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce. 1982. Extrametricality and English stress. Linguistic Inquiry 13 (2), 227–76.Google Scholar
Kastovsky, Dieter. 1986. The problem of productivity in word formation. Linguistics 24 (3), 585600.Google Scholar
Keuleers, Emmanuel. 2008. Memory-based learning of inflectional morphology. PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp.Google Scholar
Keuleers, Emmanuel, Sandra, Dominiek, Daelemans, Walter, Gillis, Steven, Durieux, Gert & Marten, Evelyn. 2007. Dutch plural inflection: The exception that proves the analogy. Cognitive Psychology 54 (4), 283318.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982a. From cyclic phonology to lexical phonology. In van der Hulst, Harry & Smith, Norval (eds.), The structure of phonological representations, 131–75. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982b. Lexical morphology and phonology. In Yang, In-Seok (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm: Selected papers from SICOL, 391. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark Y. & Prince, Alan. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8, 249336.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Mark. 2012. Rival suffixes: Synonymy, competition, and the emergence of productivity. In Angela Ralli, Geert Booij, Sergio Scalise & Athanasios Karasimos (eds.), Morphology and the architecture of grammar: Proceedings of the 8th International Morphology Meeting, 192–203. Patras: University of Patras. http://morbo.lingue.unibo.it/mmm.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Mark & Aronoff, Mark. Forthcoming. Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé & Jesse Tseng (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 7th Décembrettes. Munich: LINCOM Europa.Google Scholar
Marchand, Hans. 1969. Categories and types of present-day English word-formation. Munich: C. H. Beck.Google Scholar
Marcus, Gary F.Pinker, Stephen, Ullman, Michael, Hollander, Michelle, Rosen, T. J., Xu, Fei & Clahsen, Harald. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Matthews, Clive A. 2013. On the analogical modelling of the English past-tense: A critical assessment. Lingua 133, 360–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClelland, James L. & Rumelhart, David E.. 1985. On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In McClelland, James L. & Rumelhart, David E. (eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 2: Psychological and Biological Models, 216–71. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, Stephen. 1991. Rules of language. Science 253, 530–35.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven & Prince, Alan. 1994. Regular and irregular morphology and the status of psychological rules in grammar. In Lima, Susan D., Corrigan, Roberta & Iverson, Gregory K. (eds.), The reality of linguistic rules, 321–51. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 1996. Selectional restrictions in English suffixation revisited: A reply to Fabb (1988). Linguistics 34 (4).Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological productivity: Structural constraints in English derivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2006. Productivity. In Aarts, Bas & McMahon, April M. (eds.), The handbook of English linguistics, 537–56. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Prasada, Sandeep & Pinker, Stephen. 1993. Generalization of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes 8, 156.Google Scholar
Raffelsiefen, Renate. 1999. Phonological constraints on English word formation. In Booij, Geert & van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1998, 225–87. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Riddle, Elizabeth M. 1985. A historical perspective on the productivity of the suffixes -ness and -ity. In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.), Historical semantics: Historical word-formation (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 29), 435–61. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzan. 1983. On the productivity of word formation rules and limits of variability in the lexicon. Australian Journal of Linguistics 3 (2), 177200.Google Scholar
Säily, Tanja. 2011. Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7 (1), 119–41.Google Scholar
Säily, Tanja & Suomela, Jukka. 2009. Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters. In Renouf, Antoinette & Kehoe, Andrew (eds.), Corpus linguistics: Refinements and reassessments, 87109. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 1989. Analogical modeling of language. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 1992. Analogy and structure. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 1995. Analogy: A non-rule alternative to neural networks. Rivista di Linguistica 7 (2). 213–31.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 2002a. An overview of analogical modeling. In Skousen, Royal, Lonsdale, Deryle & Parkinson, Dilworth B. (eds.), Analogical modeling, 1126. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 2002b. Issues in analogical modeling. In Skousen, Royal, Lonsdale, Deryle & Parkinson, Dilworth B. (eds.), Analogical modeling, 2748. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 2005. Analogical modeling (49). In Köhler, Reinhard, Altmann, Gabriel & Piotrowski, Rajmund G. (eds.), Quantitative Linguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch = Quantitative linguistics (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft = Handbooks of linguistics and communication science = Manuels de linguistique et des sciences de communication / mitbegr. von Gerold Ungeheuer. Hrsg. von Armin Burkhardt . . .; Bd. 27), 705–16. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal. 2009. Expanding Analogical Modeling into a general theory of language prediction. In Blevins, James P. & Blevins, Juliette (eds.), Analogy in grammar, 164–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal, Lonsdale, Deryle & Parkinson, Dilworth B. (eds.) 2002. Analogical modeling. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal & Stanford, Thereon. 2007. AM: Parallel. Available from http://humanities.byu.edu/am/.Google Scholar
van den Bosch, Antal & Daelemans, Walter. 2013. Implicit schemata and categories in Memory-based Language Processing. Language and Speech 56 (3), 309–28.Google Scholar
van Tieken-Boon Ostade, Ingrid. 2009. An introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Wedel, Andrew B. 2006. Exemplar models, evolution and language change. The Linguistic Review 23, 247–74.Google Scholar
Zamma, Hideki. 2012. Patterns and categories in English suffixation and stress placement: A theoretical and quantitative study. PhD dissertation, University of Tsukuba.Google Scholar