Corpus-Based Research into Verb-Forming Suffixes in E nglish: Its Empirical and Theoretical Consequences (2022)

Abstract: The present study explores the semantic and structural aspects of word formation processes in English, focusing on how verbs are derived by the suffixes -ize, -ify, -en, and -ate. Based on relevant derivatives extracted from the British National Corpus, their detailed observation is made from semantic and formal viewpoints. Then their theoretical analysis is carried out in the framework of generative theory. The BNC survey demonstrates that (i) the meanings of derived verbs are largely divided into five types and the submeanings are closely related to each other, (ii) the well-formedness of derived verbs is primarily determined by the semantic and formal features of their bases, and (iii) -ize suffixation is creative enough to provide a constant supply for new labels. To account for these empirical observations, the mechanism for forming -ize derivatives is proposed in which the semantic properties and creativity of -ize derivation stem solely from the underlying structure and the formal properties of the bases derive from the lexical entry of -ize.

## introduction the central issue of generative morphology is how to account for children's lexical acquisition: they acquire the vocabulary rapidly and accurately based on limited and often degenerated data. the most promising way of achieving this is to 1 i am indebted to the research engine of www.englishcorpora.org (bnc). establish a general mechanism to generate an infinite number of possible words so that words to remember are greatly reduced in number. in addition, the mechanism itself needs to be of wide application and elegant in linguistic terms to minimize information specified in the grammar. as part of the above enterprise, the present study attempts to construct a system which automatically produce well-formed derived verbs, as in "she has been hopelessly sentimentalized and hopelessly magicalized by tradition (bnc: acl 1522)." this study is organized as follows: after outlining the method of research (section 2.1), we closely examine the derivation of verbs in english and illuminate its semantic features (sections 2.2 and 2.3). then we elucidate its morphological properties-the formal restrictions of the bases and productivity (sections 2.4-2.6). section 3 presents theoretical implications for the results of our research. a summary of the main arguments is presented in section 4. ## conclusion based on detailed observation of the derived verbs discerned in a large-scale corpus, we have revealed the essential properties of verb derivation. semantically, derived verbs are divided into five main groups and each submeaning is correlated with a base's meaning. formal restrictions are placed on the internal structures and vocabulary strata of the bases. as regards productivity, -ize affixation is creative in its construction of numerous innovated verbs. the above properties of derived verbs are theoretically accounted for; basic features common to all five submeanings follow naturally from a core part of their underlying structures. the productivity of -ize derivation also arises from its underlying syntactic configuration. finally, formal restrictions on the bases and the base-derivative meaning correlation originate in the insertion conditions of vocabulary items. a rigorous analysis of the formal restrictions and the semantic correlation awaits further investigation. hopefully, we have shown that the study of word formation mechanism can be widely promoted by "corpus-based investigation."