Info for readers
Info for authors
Info for editors
Info for libraries
Order form
Shopping cart
Pavel Stichauer
138-147 (complete pdf)
This paper investigates, in a diachronic perspective, the productivity of three Italian deverbal suffixes -- -mento, -zione and -gione -- within the framework of the corpus-based quantitative approach to morphological productivity based on Baayen's work. The study aims to support with empirical evidence the claim that there is a partial reduction of the productivity of -mento, an increasing profitability of the suffix -zione, and the disappearance of -gione in Old Italian within the time span from the 13th to the 16th century. The empirical data, obtained from four different-sized corpora (based on LIZ 4.0) corresponding to four centuries covered, are elaborated using zipfR, a tool for lexical statistics in R. The paper shows that the visual comparison of the vocabulary growth curves (as well as the P values) permit some important conclusions corroborating the above mentioned claim.
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes: Morphology in Bordeaux
edited by Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jesse Tseng
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-433-1 library binding
vii+180 pages
publication date: 2009
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA