On the Productivity of the Prefixal Reinforcer Arcy- ‘Arch-’ in Polish: A Diachronic Corpus Perspective

Abstract Although typically realized by free items, degree modification has a number of morphological exponents in Polish, including the neoclassical prefix arcy-, which, while originally attaching to profession-denoting nouns with a view to indicating a higher rank in a hierarchy, has come to perform the function of reinforcement in conjunction with adjectival bases. Since the scarce previous research concerned with the aforementioned prefixal reinforcer builds only on lexicographic material, this paper offers a quantitative, corpus-based account of the productivity of the formative at issue by providing its TTR (type-token ratio) and HTR (hapax-token ratio) measures, calculated by dividing the number of, respectively, types of adjectival bases and hapax adjectives by that of all relevant tokens, in two periods in the history of Polish, namely in the Baroque epoch, when arcy- gained a strong foothold in language practice owing to the then prevalent rhetorical tendency toward a profuse employment of elements of foreign provenance, and in contemporary Polish. The results of the empirical analysis indicate a dramatic decrease in the level of the bound form’s productivity over time, to the point that the probability of an arcy-adjective encountered by a language user being unique fell from nearly 30% in the Baroque period to less than 1% at present time, which can be accounted for in terms of the formative having been superseded by more recent, functionally analogous prefixes, particularly super- and mega-.