Estudio cuantitativo de los afijos en español

Creativity and Conventionality in Heritage Speaker Bilingualism

“…In comparison to the Germanic languages, which rely heavily on compounding, Spanish makes use of its rich and varied system of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) to create new words. According to calculations based on a 20-million-word corpus, Gómez and Pérez (2009) show that suffixation is more widespread than prefixation, with suffixed words accounting for nearly 10% of all tokens or 36% of all lemmas in the corpus. Furthermore, these suffixes are an important cue to word class; a change in word class (e.g., noun to adjective) requires the appropriate change in derivational morphology.…”

“…There are approximately 150 suffixes in Spanish, but they vary in terms of frequency. Gómez and Pérez (2009) present these suffixes in order of cumulative (token) frequency and lemma (type) frequency. Type frequency-the number of different words that share a given suffix-is particularly important because it is generally understood to be a measure of suffix productivity 1 (Bybee, 2003).…”

“…In synthesis, there are two corpus studies that give us valuable information regarding suffix frequency in Spanish. Whereas Gómez and Pérez (2009) considered all 153 suffixes in Spanish, Lázaro et al (2016) preselected 50 suffixes to include in their analysis. Thus, in order to get the clearest picture of suffix frequency in Spanish, it was necessary to consult both datasets.…”