A Corpus-based Analysis of Old English -lic and -lice

A Corpus-based Analysis of Old English -lic and -lice

  The aim of this paper is to provide a statistical analysis of morphological patterns of the Old English adjectival suffix -lic and adverbial suffix -lice. Although the synchronic function of the endings has been noted by scholars (Donner 1991, Swan 1998, McIntosh 1991) and a few attempts have been made to account for the diachronic evolution of the suffixes into Modern English (Ciszek 2002, Nevalainen 1994, 1997), a general picture of their morphological patterns in Old English has not been given proper attention. Put differently, the issues concerning the extent to which the Old English suffixes are productive and to what base categories they are attached have been left unexplored. Therefore, any generalizations concerning the morphological patterns of the endings have not been captured. Surveying 892 stems combined with the suffixes and their 26,622 tokens collected from the machine readable corpus The Dictionary of Old English Corpus, this article attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of the morphological behaviors of the OE affixes. The main results of this statistical study give proper understanding of morphological aspects of the suffixes which have not been precisely described in traditional historical handbooks.