El sufijo "ness" en la derivación léxica del inglés antiguo

Resum

: The suffix -ness has traditionally been considered as an abstract feminine nouns generator whose source predicates are adjectives or verbs, without any kind of morphological specification (Marchand, 1969; Kastovsky, 1992; Montes, 1995; Fernández, 1986). Nerthus, an online lexical databse of Old English, that contains all the predicates of the categories Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb and Adposition included in A Concise Anglo- Saxon Dictionary (1996) together with phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic information about them, allows us to carry out exhaustive analysis of the derivative processes in Old English by detailing the categories involved in each of them. Thus, after the study of the process of formation of the 948 Old English nouns derived by means of the suffix -ness, we reach the conclusion, in the first place, that not only Verbs and Adjectives are involved in the phenomenon, but also Nouns play an important role. Secondly, we can shed some light on the inflective morphology of the target predicate. Finally, we can establish a hierarquy based on the frequency of distribution, thus systematizing the source-category assignation when there exist multiple candidate