This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix "-oon." The history of non-native suffix "-oon" is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix "-oon" vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology. It…

The corpus of the study is presented and discussed, problems of Spanish suffix analysis are presented, and then noun usage--suffixed versus unsuffixed nouns, the gender marker in the corpus, the most frequently used suffixes, and general characteristics and trends of usage-are discussed. (SCC)

A careful examination of the location of variation in the grammar is advocated as opposed to attempts to cover linguistic generalizations with a single rule. Such an examination may lead to non-deterministic solutions, since there may be two distinct possible derivations for a single surface structure. For instance, in Portuguese, the variation…