According to Adamson (1989:204), English is remarkable for its “double lexicon”, in which almost all native words have Romance or Latinate synonyms whose use is sociolinguistically conditioned. Synonymous pairs of this kind can also be found among derivational affixes, such as the nominal suffixes -ness and -ity.
Previous diachronic research (e.g., Säily & Suomela 2009) has established that women use -ity significantly less productively than men, while there is no gender difference in the use of -ness. This holds for 17th-century letters in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 18th-century courtroom discourse in the Old Bailey Corpus, and various genres of present-day English in the British National Corpus, which would seem to imply a stable gender difference. However, in 18th-century letters in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension (CEECE), there is no gender difference with either suffix. Why does the CEECE deviate from the other corpora?
This study examines the differences between the corpora, comparing their generic and socio-demographic makeup and the social history of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The CEECE is subjected to a more fine-grained analysis, comparing letter collections from different social backgrounds and exploring the effect of individual outliers as well as the role played by the recipients of the letters. Future research would benefit from a tagged version of the corpus, so that the productivity of nominal suffixes could be related to variation in noun frequencies in general.
Adamson, S. 1989. With double tongue: Diglossia, stylistics and the teaching of English. Michael Short (ed.), Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 204–240. London: Longman.
Säily, T. & J. Suomela. 2009. Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters. A. Renouf & A. Kehoe (eds), Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments, 87–109. Amsterdam: Rodopi.