Actional nominalization in Present-Day English in the light of the Referenced Index of Competition

Abstract

The suffix ‑ment is a nominalizer which has been portrayed as practically “defunct” (Anshen & Aronoff 1999: 24), although recent coinages cast doubts on conclusive statements (Bauer et al. 2013). This investigation is based on nonce formations from the BNC and COCA and aims at exploring nominalizations which compete for the meaning action in order to understand the current degree of productivity of the processes involved. This is done through a corpus-based quantitative approach which considers ‑ment in the light of its relationship to other competitors, e.g. ‑ing or conversion. The results reveal that ‑ment is normally surpassed by other processes, but also that it has found a niche of application which secures a minimal productive status.