Sociolinguistic variation in English derivational productivity : Studies and methods in diachronic corpus linguistics

This electronic version comprises the summary part of the article-based dissertation. The articles (Part II, Chapters 6–11) have been left out for copyright reasons. References to the original publications can be found in Section 1.5. Preface In the spirit of the digital humanities, this work is a product of multidisciplinary collaboration. As a computer geek and an ex (or eternal) engineering student, I gained an interest in corpus linguistics soon after beginning my studies of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. I got the idea of studying sociolinguistic variation in morphological productivity from Professor Terttu Nevalainen, who taught the advanced studies seminar on sociolinguistics and who was to become the supervisor of both my MA and my PhD theses. I got the initial material – and the training to use it – from her Corpus of Early English Correspondence team. I discussed the problem of comparing type counts with my significant other, computer scientist Jukka Suomela, who promptly came up with a version of the method I have used and developed throughout this work. Terttu and Jukka (the latter now a professor at Aalto University) are the two people to whom I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. Thank you for your hard work in mentoring, assisting and co-authoring papers with me, as well as for your infinite patience, contagious enthusiasm, great ideas, and freely shared and apparently fathomless knowledge of your respective fields. And, you know, thanks for sharing your life with me, Jukka. But wait! There is more. The beginning of my PhD studies in 2009 was also the beginning of our Academy of Finland funded project, Data mining tools for changing modalities of communication (with the rather Shakespearean-insult-like acronym DAMMOC), with members from the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and the University of Tampere. My other two co-authors came from this project: the brilliant Dr. Jefrey Lijffijt from Aalto, who earned his doctorate in our project, and Dr. Harri Siirtola from Tampere, whose mad skillz in information visualisation continue to amaze me. The PI of the project, Professor Heikki Mannila from Aalto (now President of the Academy of Finland), always had excellent feedback and questions. I would also like to thank Professor Panagiotis Papapetrou and Dr. Kai Puolamäki for comments, discussions and all around good company. Many thanks to Professor Kari-Jouko Räihä from Tampere for his contributions to our visualisation papers.