Why <*-tion> can not be a suffix

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Besides our collection of printed dictionaries—both standard and etymological, the team had access to a variety of on-line tools—two in particular.

Neil Ramsden’s Word Searcher—provided the team with a quick list of all the words that were to be analysed.

Dictionary.com—is an excellent tool which detectives used to find the etymological information needed to prove they had found the base element and that they had the true denotation for the word.

The team also used Kit 4, Theme 5 on ‘The Suffixes <ion>, <ian> and <ity>’ from Melvyn Ramsden’s The Real Spelling Toolbox as a starting point for their investigation.

And Michael Quinion’s Ologies and Isms.

At some time or another during a tutorial or a discussion of the elements of English, the question arises over the suffix
<*-tion>. Many schools insist on teaching it as such and yet all evidence seems to point to the contrary. So last year I set a number of Words! Detectives the challenge of proving once and for all that there is no suffix <*-tion> and demonstrating why this is so. The detectives engaged in this activity were: Danny, Andrés and Francisco, Allegra, and Farheen and her friend Anushka. There were even a few parents and other interested adults that got in on the act.

Why <*-tion> cannot be a suffix

Because each of the detectives was working independently (they all came on different days), we needed a brief that was going to be easy to follow and provide consistence results.

A strategy was agreed on and a set of tools selected to assist the detectives. The tools were all on-line and so available to all. Parents were allowed to assist, offer suggestions, raise further challenges—we wanted to make sure every consideration was given to the possibility that if the suffix <*-tion> did exist, we would find it.

The brief was simple:

Find a word that uses the suffix <*-tion>

The criteria used to determine that a suffix was <*-tion> and not the commonly used <-ion> was as follows:

— Identify the base element for the word

— Write the word sum

— Determine the denotation of the base and

— Verify this etymologically by either diachronic analysis—identifying the root of the base— or synchronic analysis—identifying other words commonly in use that use the same base

— and thus demonstrate whether <*-tion> was or was not a suffix for this word

The Tools

The study was an on-going one and took over six months to complete (because we were doing other things at the same time). Discoveries were being made all the time (click below for details) and the results provided much in the way of learning.

Our Analysis results were compiled as our discoveries were made (see below) and the final results have been organized according to the groups as they were analysed.

Discovery #1:

Our first discovery was just how many words there were—over 2290—that have the letter string <tion> somewhere in the word. We got this list using the Word Searcher.

On closer inspection it was discovered that there was a lot of duplication as the plural form of the word was also included in the list as well as the stem with other additional suffixes e.g., congregational, deflationary, exceptionally. So by removing all these (we could do this by entering parameters in our search on the Word Searcher) we were able to reduce the list to just over 1200 words.

Discovery #2:

Our next discovery was that there were word families that shared the same base. Words with prefixes like <un->, <de->, <dis->, etc and the same base element. This meant that the words needed to be regrouped so that time would not be wasted analysing the same stem more than once. This took the detectives a bit of time and also raised some interesting questions. It also had the advantage of making us more familiar with the list. We got the list down to around 700 words or word families.

Discovery #3:

Once the list was in a more usable format, the team started to identify all the words that obviously had an <-ion> suffix. These were words that, when the suffix <-ion> was removed, revealed a stem that was either an easily recognizable base element or carried the verb-forming suffix <-ate>.

Example 1: action → act + ion

<act> is obviously the base element and we can prove this with other words like <active>, <actual>.

Example 2: communication → communicate/ + ion

<communicate> is a stem to which the suffix <-ion> has been added.

We chose not to analyse these of these words any further unless the detectives wanted to for other reasons (such as if they came up in another study) as it was obvious that the suffix in each case was
<-ion> not <*-tion>. The lists of these are included in The Analyses.

We also identified other patterns that saved us having to do detailed analyses. Our primary focus, was to find the words that did not comply to any standard pattern.

To find out more, look at our results in The Analyses ...

The Brief

Danny

Andrés

Francisco

Allegra

Farheen