0 INTRODUCTION

6. FINDINGS
scientific and medical registers. 17 The frequency of the other suffixes is much lower, –ance
being the next most common Romance suffix; its frequency is only 3.7% in E1, and
decreases even to 2.6% in E3. The frequency of –ment is 2% in E1 and slightly higher
(2.2%) in E3. The suffix –ure has a frequency of only 0.9% in E1, increasing slightly in E3
(1.8%). –Age shows low frequencies both in E1 (0.7%) and E3 (0.8%). There is no
evidence for action nouns in –al in the corpora.
The data in Table 14 show that –ing formations are the most frequent both in terms
of type and of token frequency. Having the highest token frequency implies that –ing
formations are the most common during the period. Furthermore, they also have the
highest type frequency, which means that they are attached to the widest range of bases.
Table 14. Type and token frequencies of the suffixes analyzed
SUFFIX TYPES TOKENS
–ing 489 1394
–(at)ion 286 1238
–ment 19 62
–ance 30 89
–age 5 21
–ure 7 40
–al - -
Even though the frequency of Romance suffixes clearly increases during the EModE
period, on the basis of the relatively small sample used in the present dissertation it cannot
be stated that at this time they are really productive in English. They are almost
exclusively found attached to Romance bases (e.g. attraction, suppuration,
17
In her study, Cowie (2000: 184) clarifies that the difficulty of distinguishing borrowed action
nominalizations from nominalizations created following Romance patterns, as pointed out by Nevalainen
(1999), has led her to include in her study all –(at)ion nominalizations, without making a difference between
loanwords and English coinages.
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