Daniel Węgrzyn
University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
Email: danielwegr at wp dot pl

On substantival suffixation in the Canterbury Tales

The present paper is an analytic corpus-based study of derivational suffixes forming nominals assembled from Geoffrey Chaucer’s ”Canterbury Tales”. The corpus of the substantival suffixes for the analysis in the study has been compiled on the basis of the electronic version of “The Canterbury Tales” prepared especially for linguistic studies (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme). The analysed material has been checked against alternative primary sources, namely the Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (also available on the internet at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme), and the printed edition of Riverside Chaucer published by Oxford University Press. In the paper, I discuss the mechanisms governing substantival derivation which were employed in Middle English. The main focus of the study is placed on the morphological analysis of the types of nominal suffixes identified in the corpus. I also survey and elaborate on the noun-forming suffixes employed in Chaucer and investigate the quantitative aspects of their productivity.

The approach adopted in the paper is eclectic and the major theoretical framework I operate on is transformational grammar. Nevertheless, so as to make the study of nominal suffixes as detailed as possible some semantic, and – to some extent - pragmatic factors are examined as well. Hence, apart from discussing the word-formational mechanisms governing nominal derivation in Chaucer, I demonstrate not only the morphological mechanisms operating in Middle English , but also the semantic properties of substantival suffixes .

Despite the fact that the character of the study is synchronic, I place the research findings in a diachronic perspective, comparing them to the techniques of noun-formation in Old English and Early Modern English, as well as those which are operative in Modern English word-formation theories. In this way I hope for the aforementioned analysis of substantival suffixes to complete the missing link on the historical axis of diachronic development of suffixation in English.

References

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