Something old or something new? Examining hapax legomena in corpora of historical texts

Conference item

My paper discusses the corpus linguistic theories of measuring morphological productivity through the analysis of so-called hapax legomena (or 'hapaxes'), i.e. words occurring only once in a corpus. The theories on the matter were developed in the 1990s by e.g. Brown and Liever (1991), and Baayen and Renouf (1996). The idea proposes that the number of low-frequency items of different word-formational processes is linked with the productivity of the processes, i.e. that the number of hapaxes are indicative of the number of new words coined with that particular process.

The proponents of the theory have pointed out that the hapaxes in corpora themselves are not necessarily neologisms, but that they may include merely rare items or words which are becoming obsolete. It is important to note that the theory originally intended to address the question of productivity from a synchronic point of view, with the corpus evidence also representing present-day English. The question then arises whether hapaxes are equally illustrative of productivity when we examine diachronic corpora. It seems unlikely that the relation between the trend of introducing new words, on the one hand, and that of obsolescence, on the other, would be identical from period to another.

The paper presents a study of hapaxes in three subsections of the 15-million-word Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (extended version, including texts from 1710-1920), compiled at the University of Leuven. The hapaxes (beginning with the letter m) in the corpus are examined, and categorised according to the degree of novelty of their occurrences in relation to their first recorded citations in OED Online. A comparison is then made between the three periods represented in the corpus, followed by discussion on the theoretical implications of the results.

Authors: Kaunisto, M

• Alternative title: Presented at Dictionaries and Text Corpora session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Subjects: English Language and Literature