---
title: "A Study of Noun-Deriving Suffixes in Competition in Middle English"
description: "The study measures how often these rival formations appear and how they behave in two corpora from the Stavanger Middle… 28 references."
authors: ["Esteban-Segura Laura"]
year: 2018
venue: "Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 57"
source: "https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/view/6322"
doi: "10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20186322"
licence: "CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/laura-2018-study-noun-deriving-suffixes-competition/"
---
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# A Study of Noun-Deriving Suffixes in Competition in Middle English

**Authors:** Esteban-Segura Laura · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 57](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/miscelanea-a-journal-of-english-and-american-studies/) ([Miscelánea A Journal of English and American Studies 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/miscelanea-a-journal-of-english-and-american-studies/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Zaragoza](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-zaragoza/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20186322) · [PDF](https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/download/6322/5192) · [DOI 10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20186322](https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20186322) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4289108491)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper looks at six Germanic suffixes that form abstract nouns in Middle English: -dom, -hood, -lac, -ness, -rede(n) and -ship. These suffixes could attach to the same base without a clear difference in meaning, which produced rival "suffixal doublets". The study measures how often these rival formations appear and how they behave in two corpora from the Stavanger Middle English Scribal Texts Programme, covering roughly 1200–1500. One is MEG-C, of which only the non-documentary part is used (religious prose, verse, recipes and similar). The other is MELD, which is purely documentary (legal, administrative, business). Hits were retrieved with AntConc wildcard searches built from spelling variants listed in the MED and OED. They were then cleaned by hand, lemmatised to MED headwords, checked against the OED for survival into modern English, and stored in an Access database. -ness dominates in both frequency and number of types, while -ship is the one suffix more common in documents. The appendices list many doublet sets, such as fairness alongside fairhede, fair-lac and fairship. The work adds corpus evidence on why some rival forms survived and others disappeared.

## Key points
- Data: MEG-C 2014.0 is an unpublished interim version with 482 texts and 791,689 words. Only its 226 non-documentary texts (636,241 words) were used, because about half of MELD's texts also appear in MEG-C. MELD 2014 has 518 dated, localised documents totalling 283,922 words.
- Normalised frequencies per 10,000 words, MEG-C vs MELD:
  - -ness: 38.57 vs 19.05
  - -dom: 6.06 vs 1.05
  - -hood: 4.79 vs 0.56
  - -ship: 5.48 vs 11.3
  - -rede(n): 0.56 vs 0.03
- -ship is higher in MELD because documents repeatedly use address formulas such as lordship and worship.
- Productivity is judged by raw type counts, which are not normalised, so the two corpora are compared only internally. On this measure -ness is the most productive suffix in both corpora, even though -ship has more tokens in MELD.
- Rival forms either lost out (smallship died, smallness survived) or split in meaning (hardness vs hardship). Examples of doublet sets include wickedness/wickedhede, thraldom/thralhede and martyrdom/martirrede.

## Interesting ideas
- Productivity is judged by distinct types rather than tokens, because a few very frequent words can inflate token counts; types are also left un-normalised, since dividing them by word counts mixes unlike quantities.
- Every spelling variant is collapsed onto a single dictionary headword, while the attested form and the main-entry vs variant status are recorded in separate fields.
- Apparent suffix matches are filtered out when the element is really a noun inside a compound (hogshead) or when the form may be verbal (-ing).
- Overlapping texts are removed so the two corpora stay disjoint, and results are read per text type, which explains why lordship-type words cluster in documents.
- Same-base rivals do not stay synonymous forever: one form dies out or the pair splits in meaning (hardness vs hardship).

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): when ranking suffix rules for guessing the lemma and POS of unseen words, weight each rule by how many distinct bases it covers, not by raw hit counts.
- **I2** (tokens): the lemma table can store a canonical lemma plus variant provenance, so normalisation of archaic or noisy spellings stays traceable and explainable.
- **I3** (tokens): the derivational analyser should check whether the base and the analysis are plausible before splitting off a suffix, instead of matching string endings blindly.
- **I4** (learn): split silver data and evaluation sets by genre with deduplication, so genre-specific formulas do not leak across sets or distort frequency-based conclusions.
- **I5** (world): the lexical ontology should not assume that derivations from one base share a meaning, and should mark pairs that have diverged semantically.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universidad de Málaga](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universidad-de-malaga/) — University, Málaga, Spain · 3 works · 6 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Esteban-Segura Laura. 2018. A Study of Noun-Deriving Suffixes in Competition in Middle English. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 57.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{laura2018study,
  title = {{A Study of Noun-Deriving Suffixes in Competition in Middle English}},
  author = {Esteban-Segura Laura},
  journal = {Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 57},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20186322},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20186322}
}
```

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## References

28 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*