Using Corpora for the Study of Word-Formation: A Case Study in English Negative Prefixation

This paper will show that traditional approaches to the derivation of different negative words have been of an essentially hypothetical nature, based on either linguists' intuitions or rather scant evidence, and that native-speaker dictionary entries show meaning potentials (rather than meanings) which are in fact linguistic and cognitive prototypes. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that using a large corpus of natural language can provide better answers to questions about word-formation (i.e., with particular reference to negative prefixation) than any other source of information.