A Corpus Based Measuring of Morphological Productivity of Suffixes “-able, -less, -ly, and –ment”

Abstract

This paper investigates corpus-based morphological productivity measuring of suffixes -able -ment, -less and -ly. Most words are formed by the addition of suffixes and the process is called derivation. In the process of derivation, derivational morphemes are used to form words from the exiting words. To measure the morphological productivity of suffixes -able -ment, -less and -ly, a corpus of 30 blogs on the topic of education from The Express Tribune was compiled which composed of 26686 words. All the blogs on the topic of education in The Express Tribune constitute the population of the study. A purposive sampling technique was used for the selection of blogs on the topic of education from The Express Tribune from 2011 to 2019. Raw data (metadata) composed of 30 blogs was cleaned and converted into text files. All text files were uploaded to AntConc for obtaining the required data. To make the analysis process easier, a word list of the self-compiled corpus was searched out on AntConc and pasted it on Excel Sheet. A raw list of words consists of suffixes -able -ment, -less and -ly were obtained separately which was refined by removing undesired words. Finally, the productivity of each suffix was measured by dividing the number of word hapaxes with word token respectively. The findings of the study show that all suffixes are morphological productive. Suffix -able is more productive than the other three suffixes -less,-ly and - ment. Moreover, the findings also show that it can help the teacher to teach English language to the second language learners in a predictable manner.