Lexical Affix Productivity in the History of English: A Quantitative Approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the development of lexical affixation throughout the last 700 years of the English language. More specifically, it pursues two objectives. First, a short outline of the methodological approaches will be devised reaching from stand-alone applications (Peukert 2014) and shared-work solutions (Peukert 2018) to requesting the OED RESTful API. Second, two sets of results will be presented. The first set includes overall aggregations of all productive affixes as well as their shares on the total number of each affix type. The second set of results elaborates on two interesting cases chosen from highly productive prefixes and suffixes. The contribution closes with a short discussion on alternative explanations and limitations of the chosen approach. Although the affix token frequencies by and large replicate the findings in Peukert (2016), which are based on type frequencies, the presented data substantiate the idea that, in terms of lexical morpheme usage, English reveals more and more characteristics of a prefixing language.