>
> 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/html Size: 1852 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://www.uib.no/mailman/public/corpora/attachments/20100616/a5da8c3f/attachment.txt>