speaker:

dr. Ewa Ciszek

title:

The suffix ­-ish: Its development and productivity in Middle English

abstract: 

The aim of the paper is to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the semantic development and productivity of the OE suffix -isc in Early and Late Middle English. The material used for the study comes from extensive electronic corpora.  The analysis brings to light some 10% of the Old English -isc derivatives not included in such distinctive dictionaries as Bosworth and Toller (1898-1921) or Hall (1894 [2000]). Moreover, the information on the origin of Middle English formations provided by the MED online may be sometimes misleading, e.g., some 30%(!) (10 out of about 30) of the -ish derivatives labelled as new EME coinages can actually be traced back to Old English. The last part of the paper is devoted to an investigation of the considerably lower productivity of -ish in Early Middle English as compared to that in Late Middle English.