Morphological Productivity in Diachrony: The suffixes -mento, -zione and -gione in Old Italian from the 13th to the 16th century
Abstract
The monograph investigates, in a diachronic perspective, the productivity of three Italian deverbal suffixes -mento, -zione and -gione within the framework of the corpus-based quantitative approach to morphological productivity based on Baayen’s work. The study aims to support with empirical evidence the claim that there is a partial reduction of the productivity of -mento, the increasing profitability of the suffix -zione and the disappearance of -gione in Old Italian within the time span that goes from the 13th to the 16th century.
The empirical data, obtained from four different-sized corpora (based on LIZ 4.0) corresponding to four centuries covered, are elaborated using zipfR, a tool for lexical statistics in R. The obtained results permit to draw some important conclusions corroborating the above mentioned claim.