Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations

Abstract

The first aim of this work is to examine gender-based variation in the productivity of the nominal suffixes - ness and - ity in present-day British English. Possible interpretations are presented for the findings that - ity is used less productively by women, while with - ness there is no gender difference. The second aim is to analyse the validity of hapax-based measures of productivity in sociolinguistic research. It is discovered that they require a significantly larger corpus than type-based ones, and that the category-conditioned degree of productivity P is unusable when comparing subcorpora based on social groups. Otherwise, hapax legomena remain a theoretically well-founded component of productivity measures.