Productivity in morphological negation : a corpus-based approach
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 re-investigates 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 negatively-prefixed 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. Findings show
Hulse, Victoria
Productivity in morphological negation : a corpus-based approach. 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 re-investigates 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 negatively-prefixed 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. Findings show
productivity morphological negation corpus_based approach investigates morphological productivity among contentious_issue field linguistics advent electronic corpus spark fresh interest productivity notably highly innovative measure propose writers advocate use once occurring word corpus investigates method pinpoint degree represent new_word language therefore valid indicator productivity study also_develop fine_grained method_measure productivity base analysis previously tried methodology case_study negative database negatively word british_national_corpus create relevant variable type_token examine determine combination provide pertinent measure also comment relative productivity negative prefix therefore considers appropriate historical semantic factor findings show