A Corpus Study of the English Suffixes -ness and -acy: Productivity, Genre, and Implications for L2 Learning

Autores/as

  • Ben Naismith University of Pittsburgh
  • Matthew Kanwit University of Pittsburgh

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37213/cjal.2021.28995

Resumen

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as appropriacy or goodness) have been underexamined. To address this gap, we examine two rival suffixes, -acy and -ness, through the lens of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010), considering numerous factors which might condition their varying usage. Critically, corpus data in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus (Davies, 2008-) reveal the importance of considering these affixes’ productivity in relation to genre, since -acy is especially frequent in academic texts, principally within certain social sciences. The implications for learners and teachers of English as a second language are discussed, particularly higher-level learners building communicative competence in academic contexts, along with a preliminary learner corpus comparison of the two variants.

Biografía del autor/a

Ben Naismith, University of Pittsburgh

Ben Naismith is an English language teacher, teacher trainer, writer, and researcher. He holds an MSc and MA in Applied Linguistics, and he is currently a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include lexical development, teacher pedagogy, and corpus linguistics.

Matthew Kanwit, University of Pittsburgh

Matthew Kanwit is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research on first- and second-language morphosyntactic variation has appeared in The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics and the journals Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, IRAL, and Probus.

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Publicado

2021-01-22

Cómo citar

Naismith, B., & Kanwit, M. (2021). A Corpus Study of the English Suffixes -ness and -acy: Productivity, Genre, and Implications for L2 Learning. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 115–137. https://doi.org/10.37213/cjal.2021.28995

Número

Vol. 24 Núm. 1 (2021)

Sección

Articles

Licencia

Derechos de autor 2021 Ben Naismith, Matthew Kanwit

Creative Commons License

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