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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Languages change with the development of the society, one behavior of which is theincrease of their vocabulary. Compared with the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon age, theEnglish vocabulary nowadays has risen from less than sixty thousand to more than onemillion, the number of which has now become the largest in the 21stcentury. Liu Fagong(1993) argues that this fast growth of vocabulary can generally be attributed to two aspects:the first aspect is the incorporation of a large number of foreign words; the second one is theintegration of those incorporated words with the native English words, of the native wordsthemselves and of the incorporated words themselves, the result of which is the great quantityof new words. These ways by which the number of vocabulary increases are called wordformation. There are many different ways of word formation ，
such as affixation,compounding, conversion, blending, back formation as well as shortening. As the study isconcerned with suffix ordering, this part mainly introduces the definition of affixationproposed by David Crystal (2008, 12):The morphological process whereby grammatical or lexical information is added to astem is known as affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation). Affixes are limited in alanguage, and are generally classified into three types, depending on their position withreference to the root or stem of the word: those which are added to the beginning of aroot/stem (prefixes), e.g. unhappy; those which follow a root/stem (suffixes),e.g. happiness;and those which occur within a root/stem (infixes).Concerning affixation, the problem of the order of affixes when two or more suffixesoccur in the same word has been studied by linguists for a long time. Among them, Siegel(1974), Allan (1978), Kiparsky (1982), Selkirk (1982), Mohanan (1986) and Giegerich (1999)hold that the order of affixes abides by the stratum-oriented model (also called level-orderingmodel). They believe that all the words in lexicon can find their places in the correspondingstratum, which in turn can decide to a great degree the sequence and combination of theaffixes. Fabb (1988) and Plag (1999) propose that such selectional restrictions of the affixesthemselves as their phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features play animportant role in determining their sequences.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Questions
The purpose of this research is to make an analysis of the constraints of token frequencyon English suffix ordering. So the first objective is to calculate the token frequencies of thefifteen suffixes (-dom, -ee, -en, -er, -ess, -ful (adjectival), -ful (nominal), -hood, -ish, -less,-ling, -ly (adjectival), -ness, -ship, -th) which have been chosen by other researchers in theirprevious studies. The second is to find out all the possible combinations of these suffixes andcompare their token frequencies. The third is to summarize the constraints of token frequencybased on corresponding statistics and selectional restrictions.This thesis attempts to explore the constraints of token frequency on English suffixordering through a series of data collection and calculations. According to the above purposesand significance, the specific questions to be addressed in this research are as follows:(1) What are the respective token frequencies of the fifteen suffixes?(2) Among all the suffixes