Patterns and Categories in English Suffixation and Stress Placement: A Theoretical and Quantitative Study

ii The goals of this thesis are twofold. One is to describe as extensively as possible the behavior of English suffixes in affixation; in particular, the properties of the bases to which they attach, and the stress pattern they exhibit. The second goal is to provide a theory which properly accounts for the behavior of the suffixes, and predict the proportions of each stress/word-formation pattern in the English lexicon. An extensive investigation is first carried out utilizing a CD-ROM version of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. This provides numerical data regarding word properties resulting from suffixation. The survey focuses on (i) whether the base of the suffix is a bound root or not ('root attachability'); (ii) whether base stress is preserved ('stress preservation'), and (iii) the stress pattern. These data are considered to be of some importance, as no quantitative investigation of this scale with respect to these properties has been carried out before. The rates of the first two properties are used to determine a suffix's 'classhood'