A Quantitative Linguistic Study On The Productivity Of Derivational Suffixes Across Different Registers

The aim of this paper is to investigate the variation of suffix productivity across different registers.15 derivative suffixes were selected as the research objects,and the concept of suffix productivity was processed using fuzzy set theory.This approach assigns each member of the suffix a productivity category ranging from 0 to 1,where the closer the membership degree is to 1,the more inclined the suffix is to a certain class,and the closer it is to 0,the less inclined the suffix is to a certain class.Firstly,Baayen’s measurement method for realizing and expanding productivity was applied to the BNC-Baby corpus as a whole and to four different registers:academic,news,fiction,and spoken register.To estimate the morphological productivity of the selected derived suffixes,Microsoft Excel was used to investigate and analyze the 4 million words in the corpus.The data was then clustered into three categories using MATLAB: unproductive,semi-productive,and productive.Secondly,the results of the two productivity measures are represented by fuzziness graphs,and then 15 derived suffixes were analyzed and discussed in detail according to the statistical data and the graphs.The results show that the productivity of suffixes varies significantly in different registers and there are three types of variation:degree variation,set variation and mixed variation(both degree and set).Degree variation refers to cases where the set to which the suffix belongs has not changed,but the degree of membership has changed,and this type of variation accounts for the largest proportion in this study.Set variation refers to cases where the set to which the suffix belongs has changed.The range of this variation is relatively large and the proportion of such variation is relatively small in this study.Mixed variation refers to a combination of the above two types of variation,which accounts for a moderate proportion in this study.Finally,the results of this study are compared with previous studies.At the end of the thesis,we compare the research results with those of Baayen.This study is a good supplement to previous studies and further enriches the research field of morphological productivity.The organic combination of language research,mathematical calculation and fuzzy set theory in this study not only helps us to have a broader,deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the macro variation of affix generation ability across different registers,but also supplements the research field of morphological productivity to a certain extent and enriches the research methods of linguistics.