Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2014 / Hapax Legomena and the Productivity of the Old English Weak Verb Suffixes 1

Hapax Legomena and the Productivity of the Old English Weak Verb Suffixes 1

Paper · 2014 · Roberto Torre Alonso

Summary

The article examines how productive seven Old English suffixes that build weak verbs (-ettan, -læcan, -sian, -nian, -lian, -erian, -cian) were, viewed synchronically. A historical language makes this hard: the records are fragmentary, productivity cannot be tested on speakers, and the period spans centuries of change. Torre Alonso and Maíz Villalta take types from the Nerthus lexical database and tokens from The Dictionary of Old English Corpus. They compute frequency by type and by token, along with two Baayen-style measures: a narrowly defined productivity index (P) and a global one (P*). Their methodological contribution is to stop treating "hapax" as a single category. They separate three kinds: absolute hapaxes (one occurrence, one text), relative hapaxes (several texts, once in each) and mixed hapaxes (both kinds together), and compute productivity under each. This graded view brings out -sian, -erian, -lian and -cian, whose productivity runs from very low to zero. The authors argue that the method measures low productivity more accurately and fits better with qualitative evidence of lexicalisation and affix loss.

Key points

  • Seven weak-verb suffixes are studied. Earlier grammars (Jember et al. 1975, Kastovsky 1992, Lass 1994, Quirk and Wrenn 1994) disagree on the inventory, and only -ettan and -sian are accepted by all. The authors therefore argue for the derivational status of the other five.
  • Token data come from The Dictionary of Old English Corpus: about 3 million words in roughly 3,000 texts, split into prose, poetry and glosses.
  • Type data come from Nerthus (consulted May 2011), which has about 30,000 headwords drawn from Bosworth-Toller, Sweet and Clark Hall.
  • The measures are type and token frequency, P (hapaxes divided by tokens, after Baayen) and global productivity P*. Each is computed under three hapax definitions: absolute, relative and mixed.
  • Following Bauer, productivity is split into availability and profitability. The authors argue that profitability, meaning how much a process is actually used, has to be central for a historical language.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Count singletons at more than one granularity: once in the whole corpus versus once per document. This separates truly isolated forms from forms spread thinly across sources, which a single hapax count merges.
  • I2. Pair a lemmatised lexicon for types with an unlemmatised corpus for tokens. One dictionary type then maps to many inflected forms, each with its own text frequency.
  • I3. Low scores may reflect weak measurement rather than low productivity, so check them against qualitative evidence such as lexicalisation or loss of semantic transparency.
  • I4. Random-permutation tools (Suomela's Types 1/Types 2) give upper and lower bounds for type counts at chosen significance levels, so comparisons between subcorpora become tests rather than raw numbers.
  • I5. When reference sources disagree on an inventory, argue the status of each disputed item from evidence before counting anything.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): when judging silver data, a new lemma or construction seen once in each of several documents can count as better evidence of a live pattern than a lone corpus-wide singleton.
  • I2 (tokens): the morphology module could weigh derivational analyses of unknown words using WordNet lemma types together with corpus token counts per inflected form.
  • I3 (learn): low-count metrics for rare classes should be flagged as uncertain and cross-checked with negative controls, not taken at face value.
  • I4 (learn): permutation bounds could show whether a construction or error type is genuinely more frequent in one genre, such as fables versus school texts, or whether the difference is noise.
  • I5 (tokens): disputed derivational affixes in the English morphology tables could carry a recorded justification, which keeps lemma splitting explainable.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de La RiojaLogroño · Spain24 works · 125 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Roberto Torre Alonso. 2014. Hapax Legomena and the Productivity of the Old English Weak Verb Suffixes 1. NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.35360/njes.325

@article{alonso2014hapax,
  title = {{Hapax Legomena and the Productivity of the Old English Weak Verb Suffixes 1}},
  author = {Roberto Torre Alonso},
  journal = {NJES: Nordic Journal of English studies 13},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.35360/njes.325},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.35360/njes.325}
}

References

50 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Amos, Ashley C. 1980. Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Medieval Academy of America. find
  2. Aronoff, Mark. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, Massachusets: MIT Press. find
  3. Baayen, Harald. 1989. A Corpus-Based Approach to Morphological Productivity. Doctoral dissertation. Free University of Amsterdam. 208 Roberto Torre Alonso and Gema Maíz Villalta Baayen, Harald. 1992 “Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity”. Yearbook of Morphology 1991 Eds Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. 109-149. find
  4. Baayen, Harald. 1993. “On Frequency, Transparency and Productivity.” Yearbook of Morphology 1992. Eds. Gert E. Booij and Jaap Van Marle Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.181-208. ↗
  5. Baayen, Harald. 1994 “Productivity in production”. Language and Cognitive Processes 9: 447-469. find
  6. Baayen, Harald. 2009 “Corpus linguistics in morphology: morphological productivity”. Corpus Linguistics. An international handbook. Eds. Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kyto. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter .900-919. find
  7. Baayen, Harald & Rochelle Lieber. 1991. “Productivity and English derivation: a corpus-based study.” Linguistics 29: 801-843. ↗
  8. Bauer, Laurie. 2001. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  9. Bauer, Laurie. 2004. A Glossary of Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. find
  10. Bauer, Laurie. 2005. “Productivity: Theories.” Handbook of Word-Formation. Eds. Pavol Štekauer and Rochelle Lieber. Dordrecht: Springer. 315-334. find
  11. Bosworth, Joseph and Thomas N. Toller. 1973. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark Hall, John. find
  12. R. 1996. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. find
  13. Fernández-Domínguez, Jesús, Ana Díaz-Negrillo and Pavol Štekauer. 2007. “How is low morphological productivity measured?” Atlantis 29: 29–54 Gardner, Anne. Derivation in Middle English: Regional and Text Type Variation. Unpublished PhD. find
  14. Givón, Talmy. 2009. The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↗
  15. Hallander, Lars-Gunnar. 1966. Old English Verbs in -sian: A Semantic and Derivational study. Stockholm Studies in English: University of Stockholm. find
  16. Haselow, Alexander. 2010. Typological Changes in the Lexicon. Analytic Tendencies in English Noun Formation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Old English Weak Verb Suffixes Healey, Antonette diPaolo (ed.). 2004. The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. ↗
  17. Hopper, Paul and Elisabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press. find
  18. Jember, Gregory K. et al. 1975. English-Old English, Old English-English Dictionary. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. find
  19. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1986. “Deverbal nouns in Old and Modern English: from stem-formation to word-formation”. Historical Semantics-Historical Word Formation. Ed. Jacek Fisiak. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 221-61. ↗
  20. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1989. “Typological Changes in the History of English Morphology”. Meaning and Beyond. Ernst Leisi zum 70. Geburstag. Ed. Udo Fries and Martin Heusser. Tübingen: Narr. 281-93. find
  21. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1990. “The typological status of Old English Word Formation”. Papers from the 5 th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Eds. Sylvia M. Adamson, Vivien A. Law, Nigel Vincent and Susan Wright. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 205-224. ↗
  22. Kastovsky, Dieter. 1992. “Semantics and vocabulary”. The Cambridge History of the English Language I: The Beginnings to 1066. Ed. Richard Hogg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 290-408. ↗
  23. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2005. “Conversion and/on zero: word-formation theory, historical linguistics, and typology”. Approaches to Conversion/Zero Derivation. Eds. Laurie Bauer and Salvador Varela (eds.). Münster: Waxmann. 31-50. find
  24. Kastovsky, Dieter. 2006. “Typological Changes in Derivational Morphology”. The Handbook of The History of English. Eds. Ans van Kemenade and Los Bettelou (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell. 151-177. find
  25. Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  26. Lehmann, Christian. 2002. “Myths and the prehistory of grammars”. Journal of Linguistics 38. 113-136. find
  27. Maíz Villata, Gema. 2011. Assessing the productivity of the Old English –læcan”. Miscelanea. A Journal of English and American Studies 43: 55-72 210 Roberto Torre Alonso and Gema Maíz Villalta Maíz Villalta, Gema. 2011. “Low Productivity indexes: The Old English verbal suffixes -ettan and –læcan”. RESLA-Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 25: 117-131. find
  28. Marckwardt, Albert H. 1942. “The Verbal Suffix -ettan in Old English”. Language 18: 275-281. ↗
  29. Martín Arista, Javier. 2008. “Unification and separation in a functional theory of morphology”. Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Ed. Robert D. Van Valin Jr. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 119-145. ↗
  30. Martín Arista, Javier. 2009. “A Typology of Morphological Constructions”. Deconstructing Constructions. Eds Christopher Butler and Javier Martín Arista. Amsterdam: John Benjamins .85-115 Martín Arista, Javier. 2010a. “OE strong verbs derived from strong verbs”. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 7/1: 36-56. ↗
  31. Martín Arista, Javier. 2010b. “Lexical negation in Old English”. NOWELE-North-Western European Language Evolution. 60/61: 89-108. ↗
  32. Martín Arista, Javier. 2010c. “Building a lexical database of Old English: issues and landmarks”. Current projects in historical lexicography. Ed. John P. Considine. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 1-33. find
  33. Martín Arista, Javier. 2011a. “Projections and Constructions in Functional Morphology. The Case of Old English HRĒOW”. Language and Linguistics 12/2: 393-425. find
  34. Martín Arista, Javier. 2011b. “Adjective formation and lexical layers in Old English”. English Studies 92/3: 323-344. ↗
  35. Martín Arista, Javier. 2011c. “Morphological relatedness and zero alternation in Old English”. Morphosyntactic Alternations in English. Ed. Pilar Guerrero Medina. London: Equinox. 311-336. find
  36. Martín Arista, Javier. 2012. “Lexical Database, Derivational Map and 3D Representation”. RESLA-Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada. (Extra 1): 119-144. find
  37. Martín Arista, Javier. 2013a. “Recursivity, derivational depth and the search for Old English lexical primes”. Studia Neophilologica85/1: 1-21. ↗
  38. Martín Arista, Javier. 2013b. “Old English Lexical Primes: Corpus Analysis and Database Compilation”. Creation and Use of Historical Old English Weak Verb Suffixes Linguistic Corpora in Spain. Ed. Nila Vázquez. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. 335-357. Martín Arista, Javier. et al.2009. Nerthus: An Online Lexical Database of Old English. [Available at: http://www.nerthusproject.com] ↗
  39. Mateo Mendaza, Raquel. 2012. “The Old English Adjectival suffixes -cund and -isc: textual occurrences and productivity”. ES-Revista de Filología Inglesa 33: 197-213. find
  40. Mateo Mendaza, Raquel. 2014. “The Old English Adjectival affixes -ful and ful-: a text-based account on productivity”. NOWELE-North-Western European Language Evolution 67/1: 77-94. ↗
  41. Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. find
  42. Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↗
  43. Plag, Ingo. 2006. Productivity. Handbook of English Linguistics. Eds. Bas Aarts, B. and April McMahon. Oxford: Blackwell. 537-556. find
  44. Quirk, Randolph and Charles L. Wrenn 1994. An Old English Grammar. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. find
  45. Rainer, Franz. 2005. “Semantic change in word formation”. Linguistics 43/2: 415-441. ↗
  46. Säily, Tanja and Jukka Suomela. 2009. “Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters.” In Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Eds. Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 87-109. ↗
  47. Säily, Tanja 2011. “Variation in morphological productivity in the BNC: Sociolinguistic and methodological considerations”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7/1: 119-41. ↗
  48. Štekauer, Pavol. 2005. Meaning predictability in word-formation: Novel, context-free naming units. Amsterdam: Benjamins. find
  49. Sweet, Henry. 1976. The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  50. Trips, Carola. 2009. Lexical Semantics and Diachronic Morphology. The Development of -hood, -dom and -ship in the History of English. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alonso-2014-hapax-legomena-productivity-old-english/