Using COHA search for words ending in the suffix -eer (as in...

Using COHA search for words ending in the suffix -eer (as in charioteer or mountaineer). You'll first need to clean the data, as you did for the exercises in Chapter 3 . Then look for all the -eer words which occur with a frequency of 1 . Check which decade each word appeared in and see if you can make a graph showing how many hapaxes occurred in each decade. (You don't need to do a $P$ calculation - just count items with a frequency of 1 in each decade.) Can you see any trends in the productivity of the suffix -eer?

Key Concepts

Frequency Analysis

Frequency analysis involves counting the occurrences of specific words or types within a text corpus. By tracking the frequency of items, such as hapaxes or words with a particular suffix, across different time periods or categories, researchers can identify trends, shifts, or patterns in language usage and evolution.

Hapax Legomena

Hapax legomena are words that occur only once within a corpus or a defined segment of text data. They are important because they can highlight unique or rare forms of language use and, in quantitative studies, help gauge variability or innovation in language, such as the formation of new words.

Data Cleaning

This refers to the process of preparing raw text data for analysis by correcting, removing, or standardizing inconsistent or unwanted parts of the data. In the context of corpus research, data cleaning might involve removing non-alphanumeric characters, extra spaces, or irrelevant metadata so that further analysis like word frequency counts is accurate and meaningful.

Corpus Analysis

Corpus analysis is the systematic study of language data obtained from a collection of texts, or corpus. Researchers use this method to examine language trends, patterns, and usage over time. It involves tasks such as querying for specific words or morphemes, determining frequencies, and evaluating contextual usage across different subsets of the corpus.

Suffix Productivity

Suffix productivity refers to the extent to which a suffix can be used to create new words in a language. In linguistic morphology, examining the productivity of a suffix helps researchers understand how frequently and flexibly it is applied to form words, offering insights into patterns of word formation and language change over time.

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