Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change

Building on Kempf (2016), this paper analyzes genre influence on adjectival derivation in the history of German. The approach is empirical, based on data from two corpora of historical German (1350–1800 ). Quantitative measures of word-formation productivity reveal substantial differences between sermons, narrative prose, scientific texts, and newspapers. A long-term diachronic comparison highlights considerable changes in suffix distribution. Against this backdrop, the four genres are assessed