A Corpus Study of the English Suffixes -ness and -acy: Productivity, Genre, and Implications for L2 Learning

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as appropriacy or goodness) have been underexamined. To address this gap, we examine two rival suffixes, -acy -ness, through lens Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010), considering numerous factors which might condition their varying usage. Critically, corpus data in Corpus Contemporary American British National (Davies, 2008-) reveal importance these affixes’ productivity relation since is especially frequent academic texts, principally within certain social sciences. The implications learners teachers a are discussed, particularly higher-level building communicative competence contexts, along with preliminary learner comparison variants.