More than blue-eyed: a corpus-based study of compounds with the derivational suffix -ed

This thesis offers a corpus-based analysis of compounds that contain the derivational suffix -ed. This word-formation pattern is illustrated by forms such as red-faced (man), two-storied (building), life-jacketed (body). The formal and functional properties of these compounds are defined on the basis of a thorough review of descriptive and theoretical studies from various backgrounds. Particular attention is given to studies on the derivational suffix -ed and on (para)synthetic compounds, which explore the co-occurrence of derivation and compounding as often (but not always) responsible for creating -ed compounds. Corpus data for the present study is extracted and manually selected from COCA. The analysis shows that -ed compounds are significantly more frequent in written texts than in spoken ones and that it is in fictional texts where this word-formation pattern is most productive. The analysis of morphological constituents in -ed compounds in COCA reveals recurring patterns in the choice of the lexical items that combine within these compounds. While it has long been noticed that the suffix -ed attaches to inalienable nouns, this study highlights that certain nouns are used more frequently than others in these formations. The choice of the lexical items that function as modifying element in -ed compounds also favors specific semantic and syntactic categories. From the concordance study of -ed compounds in context, it also emerges that these formations are used predominantly in prenominal positions. Based on these results, it is argued that the usage of this word-formation pattern shows clear tendencies to lexicalizations at various levels.