[Corpora-List] List of most frequent affixes in English

[Jim Fidelholtz]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Fatemeh Torabi Asr <torabiasr at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> What I actually need is a reference who claims that the frequency of
> suffixes is higher in general (or specifically in Child-Directed-Speech) in
> comparison with prefixes.
> ...


"The frequency of suffixes is higher in general (and specifically in
Child-Directed-Speech) in comparison with prefixes."

                   -James L. Fidelholtz (personal communication)
If you don't believe that, with a fairly easy-to-write script on English
CHILDES texts (which come in ASCII), you can: 1) eliminate all lines
beginning in *CHI; 2) Eliminate other markups (comment lines, etc.), other
child speakers (maybe), etc.; 3) eliminate all occurrences of asterisk
followed by three characters followed by space"; 4) pick out all words with
prefixes (list in Ljung or other references cited by others or in various
cited grammars) and count them; 5) pick out all suffixes (list in ...) and
count them; 4a-5a) Note: an easy way to do this is to just grab all words
beginning like any prefix on the list; you'll get many non-prefixed
(respectively, non-suffixed) words, but the orders of magnitude will be
correct); 6) compare the results of (4) with those of (5) [the latter *will*
be bigger]. The end.   ;)

Jim

-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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