English Lexical Enrichment: Methods and their Frequency/Productivity in 1785, 1885, and 1985

Abstract

There are a number of different categories of enriching English vocabulary, and they are grouped into smaller methods based on the way they function. Some methods are productive while some others are creative. Besides, some methods are more or less frequent/productive than others which may be due to a number of reasons such as the nature of the language itself and possibly the period the language is undergone on. Therefore, three different years from different centuries, precisely 1785, 1885, and 1985, are taken from Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to discover the frequency/productivity of the methods in each. The concrete results show that the language and time play the role in the frequency and productivity of each method. They also indicate that the frequency of some methods has gradually increased while of some others decreased.