Abstract To form new denominal verbs in present-day English, language users mostly choose between conversion (e.g., to Google, to hashtag, to snowboard) and affixation (e.g., to demyth, to encode, to gamify, to McDonaldize). Drawing on a framework borrowed from evolutionary biology, we state that different morphological processes competing for the same resources (e.g., meaning or distribution) cannot coexist in the same environment: either the less productive process becomes extinct, or both survive by occupying distinct ecological niches (e.g., morphological, phonological, semantic, or geographical). The potential role of attestation dates as such a “chronological niche” has not been investigated. Drawing from a dataset of 574 denominal verbs formed by conversion or affixation since 1950 and collected from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this article shows that the attestation date of the nominal input influences the choice of verb-forming process. Recently attested nouns (i.e., within the last 50 years) tend to undergo conversion, whereas affixation is more likely to derive nouns that have been in use for centuries. In the case of doublets, i.e., verbs formed on the same base noun (e.g., to game / to gamify, to gender / to genderize, to queue / to dequeue), conversion is predominantly attested first, and affixation typically appears later, often to convey semantic differentiation.
Chloé Debouzie (Thu,) studied this question.