THE EMERGENCE OF SELF-ORGANIZATION IN LANGUAGE: EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH WORD FORMATION

Certain subsystems of human languages can be profitably studied as self-organizing or emergent systems. In this presentation we will show that the birth of productive affixes from borrowed vocabulary can be treated as an emergent system, using modern databases and the Internet. We present two types of evidence. The first addresses the question of how a language borrows affixes at all. We examine the history of two suffixes in English, -ment and –ity, both of which came into English from French, using the OED on CD-Rom as a database. Both suffixes had their origins in words borrowed individually from French. Before 1600, the great majority of new words in –ity were borrowed; beginning around 1600, the percentage of coinages increased rapidly, soon reaching 80% and plateauing at 95% by 1800. Since 1900, only two words ending in –ity have been borrowed, while close to 500 have been coined. We thus have evidence that -ity became a productive suffix once there were enough exemplars for a tipping point to be reached, which is typical for self-organizing systems. The history of –ment shows that the story is not so simple. Here, although newly coined words outnumbered borrowed words two-to-one by 1600, paralleling –ity, the pattern never became a truly productive suffix. Since 1900, only 30 words ending in –ment have been coined, as opposed to almost 500 in –ity, showing that the number of exemplars is not the only factor in determining whether a system self-organizes.

The second study addresses the synonymous suffix pair –ic and –ical, which we analyze in greater detail. The overall goal in studying such pairs is to discover why a language would systematize synonymous productive affixes. English exhibits a large number of doublets containing both rival suffixes, e.g. geographic and geographical; but with many pairs one member is strongly preferred over the other: statistical is much more common than statistic, while heuristic is much more common than heuristical. First we ask whether both suffixes are in fact productive and whether one suffix is more productive than the other overall. In this study, we measure productivity as the total number of Google hits for every word ending in each suffix: for every word, we do a Google search on the exact word and list the number of hits, which provides a much larger sample than if we measured frequency within a preexisting corpus.

From Merriam-Webster's Second International Dictionary, available online, we identified 11966 stems of English words ending in either –ic or – ical. For each stem, either one or both derivatives was listed in the dictionary. We then searched for words ending in both – ic and – ical in each of the 11966 stems. For some stems, a search will record hits for both – ic and – ical words (e.g. historic and historical), while for some, only one is found (e.g. transoceanic vs. *transoceanical but pseudopsychological vs.* pseudopsychologic). We then determined for each pair whether – ic or – ical had more hits. The one with more hits is the 'winner' for that pair.

We then put this database of –ic and – ical pairs and associated numbers of Google hits in an Excel spreadsheet and subjected it to analysis. Overall, we identified 10613 – ic winners vs. 1353 – ical winners, with an overall ratio of 7.84 in favor of – ic. This demonstrates that overall – ic is more productive than – ical. Finer-grained analysis, however, reveals a subtler story. First, we sorted all the items in our database into reverse-alphabetical neighborhoods of from three to seven letters, not including final – al. When we sort the words in this way, the only set of words ending in – ical with a neighborhood >100 in size is – ological; for this subset only, – ical is the winner over – ic (e.g. psychological over psychologic), by a total ratio of 8.30, almost the exact reverse of the ratio of the full set (7.84 in favor of – ic). In other words, although overall – ic is more productive than – ical, the reverse is true for words ending in – ological. Another set of words for which – ical is more productive than expected comprises those based on nouns ending in – ics (e.g. physics, physical, physic). For these, adjectives in – ic still outnumber those in – ical, but – ical words are twice as common as normal, outnumbered only four to one by – ic, instead of the normal 8.30. Overall, and somewhat surprisingly, English derivational morphology, especially when it involves the emergence of productive affixes from sets of borrowed words (in which English is especially rich), is a fertile proving ground for the study of self-organizing systems in languages, in part because of the databases that electronic resources provide.

Note from Publisher: This article contains the abstract only.