Sociolinguistic variation in morphological productivity in eighteenth-century English

This paper presents ongoing work on Säily and Suomela’s (2009) method of comparing type frequencies across subcorpora. The method is here used to study variation in the productivity of the suffixes -ness and -ity in the eighteenth-century sections of the Corpora of Early English Correspondence and of the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC). Unlike the OBC, the eighteenth-century section of the letter corpora differs from previously studied materials in that there is no significant gender difference in the productivity of -ity. The study raises methodological issues involving periodization, multiple hypothesis testing, and the need for an interactive tool. Several improvements have been implemented in a new version of our software.