Review: Kaunisto (2007) Variation and Change in the Lexicon: A Corpus-based Analysis of Adjectives in English Ending in –ic and –ical. New York: Rodopi

Abstract

Mark Kaunisto’s book is a recent addition to Rodopi’s Language and Computers series, which focusses on research grounded in theory and practical application. In common with many other volumes in the series, this book presents a corpus-based study of the variation of one particular linguistic feature: English adjectives ending in –ic and –ical. This book illustrates, broadly, how corpora can be used to provide a diachronic examination of word-formation processes that produce lexical competition. More narrowly, the book offers a detailed examination of eight pairs of words with the competing suffixes –ic and –ical in British English. The introductory chapter positions the current study within the field of corpus-based studies on word formation and lexicology, demonstrating the need for research that moves beyond the study of word-formational processes that result in morphological rivalry and towards those that address the corresponding lexical rivalry. According to Kaunisto, studies of the latter type have, until recently, been difficult to undertake due to the lack of historical corpora that are representative in their size and scope, as well as the overwhelming abundance of lexemes with such affixes in contemporary English language corpora. Kaunisto offers an interesting discussion of the origin of the two competing suffixes under examination, raising the question of why, in some cases, lexical rivalry leads to semantic differentiation, while in others it leads to a purging of one variant from the language entirely. He concludes the chapter with an overview of the book. Chapter 2 provides a description of the materials used in this study. The thirty-five million word corpus used as the primary source of contemporary data contains newspaper texts from 1995 which are taken from The Daily Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph (TDT/TST). Secondary corpora that were consulted include the British National Corpus (BNC), Collins WordbanksOnline corpus and issues from previous years of the