Rivalry between English Negative Suffixes -less and -free: The Reflex from Synchronic vs. Diachronic Contact Situations

The comparison of the suffixes -less and -free in Dixon (2014) can be considered as a competition in which they simultaneously act as ‘rivals’ (Lindsay and Aronoff 2013). This study endeavors to uncover a novice description for the semantic distributions of the negative suffixes -less and -free by corpora online in order to explore how their dynamic rivalry mechanism runs. The results show that when -free begins to be involved in the rivalry, in order to tolerate the occurrence of the synonymous counterpart, both -less and -free endeavor to find the niches (e.g., X1, X2) that can render them successful with connotative meanings, such as X1-less with the meaning ‘preference o r permis sion for the existence (of the referent)’ (M ppfe), and X2-free with the meaning ‘preference for the nonexistence (of the referent)’ (M pfn). Moreover, the individual preference for the stems that endow the suffixes with new denotative meanings also gives them chances to survive in the competition.