LACUS
FORUM
XXVII
Speaking and
Comprehending
© 2009 The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (lacus).
The content of this article is from lacus Forum 27 (published 2001). This article and others
from this volume may be found on the Internet at http://www.lacus.org/volumes/27.
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   
 ’ - 
PRESIDENTS’ PREDOCTORAL PRIZE
The Presidents’ Pre-Doctoral Prize is awarded annually to the paper
judged to make the greatest contribution to linguistic knowledge
presented by an author who has not yet completed a doctorate.
The judging panel consists of the current  President and Vice
President along with all past presidents in attendance at the meeting.
NOBILITY IN THE HISTORY OF ADJECTIVES ENDING IN IC AND ICAL
M K
University of Tampere
. In the study of word-formation, the possibility of using large text
corpora has in the last few years opened whole new avenues of research. Whereas earlier studies have pointed out and explained different kinds of phenomena and types
of word-formation, it has been somewhat difficult to present in an exact and detailed
manner the extent and proportion of e.g. changes in a language, let alone to prove
the validity of some of the propositions made in this field (sometimes possibly based
on intuition plus only a few examples). The historical aspects in some of the basic
textbooks of word-formation, for example, Marchand’s (), are heavily based on
findings from the Oxford English Dictionary, and at the time of the book’s release,
Marchand’s perceptive observations undoubtedly seemed to have a very solid base.
Now that we have the ability to do more computerized searches from large corpora
and thus to focus on even the smallest units in detail, the future will no doubt see, to
some extent, a more in-depth rewriting of the basics of English word-formation and,
as Kennedy (:) has pointed out, altogether new theoretical generalisations.
From the viewpoint of corpus linguistics, word-formation seems to be a field
where the topics of research may set rather high requirements for corpus size in order
to achieve scientifically valid findings. What is a suitably large corpus depends, of
course, very much on what one is investigating. Some word-formation types (e.g.
blending) can be difficult to examine because of the relative infrequency of such
words in almost any collection of texts. Suffixation in general is an issue that has been
examined from different aspects (see e.g., Biber et al. :), but studies on the use
of individual suffixes are fewer. In this paper I will outline earlier studies on the variation between adjectives ending in -ic and -ical, and introduce my current work on the
topic, with special attention given on their use in the Early Modern English period.
.   -  -. The incidence of the suffixes -ic and -ical presents a
complex picture in the vocabulary of present-day English, and there are cases in which
both suffixes are used in connection with the same root, as in analytic/analytical and
philosophic/philosophical. The existence of such competing adjective pairs has been
observed by several grammarians, one of the first being James Elphinston in ,
who comments on some differences between the general semantic content of the two
endings. The issue has been looked into by late th century grammarians and th century lexicographers, but at closer examination it becomes evident that the question of
when each variant should be used is unanswered. The aim of my research is to study the
ways in which such adjectives have been used in different times, and how their use has
36
 
changed, describing the different currents of change and the linguistic factors involved
(syntactic, semantic, etc.) and also to see why such changes took place.
The models for the English suffixes -ic and -ical were the French words ending in
-ique, Latin words ending in -icus and -icalis, and Greek words ending in -ikós. The
first words with the suffix -ic appeared in Old English, and the -ical formations appear
in the Middle English period. The present-day situation of free variation between
some adjectives in -ic and -ical (e.g., in the British National Corpus, the numbers of
occurrences for pedagogic and pedagogical are roughly equal, and there seem to be no
apparent differences as to their meaning or collocations) is a result of the fact that in
the Early Modern English period, both endings were used to produce new adjectives,
the functions of the endings being almost identical (‘of, belonging or pertaining to,
resembling X’).
Earlier accounts on the developments in the use of -ic and -ical may seem somewhat confusing: for example, some of Marchand’s comments suggest that forms in -ical
would be in general more common than the -ic forms, and in the case of competing
pairs, the longer forms are ‘stronger’. He also states that, as a result of competition between two synonymous adjectives in -ic and -ical, the shorter forms are usually the ones
that have been thrown out (:). These comments are in opposition to Earle’s
(:) observations, according to which the appearance of both nouns and adjectives in -ic caused ‘a demand for an adjectival form which should be equivocal’, resulting
in ‘a strain of adjectives in -ical which is one of the notes of the literature of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and which has been largely discarded in recent times’. In
addition, it has been claimed that the more recent the coinage, the more likely it is to
have the -ic rather than the -ical ending (e.g., Swan :).
.    . To investigate the productivity of -ic and -ical
in different periods, I studied the - version of the OED, and the first citations
of -ic/-ical adjectives, modelled after Bauer’s similar examination of the diachronic
productivity of -ment (:–). One can agree with comments on the dangers
of inaccuracies in such a research, but it can nevertheless be assumed that the resulting patterns are indicative of the actual productivity (see Görlach :; Bauer
:). Given the very large number of -ic/-ical adjectives in the OED, it was considered sufficient to examine a small fraction of them. The numbers of first citations
of -ic/-ical adjectives beginning with the randomly chosen letters a, c, f, and u are
presented in Figure 1.
The first rather peculiar observation one can make from this figure is that both
curves have two peaks, which is also what Bauer (:) discovered with the suffix
-ment. Bauer concludes from the two-peaked figure of -ment formations that ‘productivity may change over time in ways that are not directly related to the number of
available bases’. The changes in the productivity seem to correspond with the overall
numbers of new words coined in these periods: Görlach (:–) explains that
the reasons for the growth period of the English lexicon between  and  were
‘the need to express new ideas in English’ and ‘the subjective desire to enrich the rhe-
        -  -
37
600
500
400
ic
ical
300
200
100
1950–
1900–49
1850–99
1800–49
1750–99
1700–49
1650–99
1600–49
1550–99
1500–49
1450–99
1400–49
1350–99
1300–49
0
Figure . The numbers of first citations of words with the suffixes -ic and -ical in the OED.
torical potential of the vernacular’. He also remarks that as a result of this period,
characterized by linguistic experimentation, there was a great deal of redundancy
‘often on the basis of competing derivational patterns’.
It can further be observed from Figure  that between  and , roughly the same
number of new adjectives were coined with -ic and -ical endings. Considering especially
the latter half of the th century, it can be said that the increase in the coinages in -ical
formations began before that of the shorter forms. During the latter half of the th century, new words in -ic were coined at an increasingly faster rate, and slightly more new
words in -ic were recorded than coinages in -ical, but the longer suffix still seemed to be
productive. In the first half of the th century, the numbers of new coinages drop for
both suffixes, which again follows the numbers of all new coinages between  and ,
as reported by Görlach (:). In the th century, -ic becomes dominant over -ical as
far as new coinages are concerned, to a great deal because of its high productivity in new
scientific terms, especially in chemistry (e.g., acidic, allylic, cresylic, cyanic, etc.), with -ical
forms also resulting in a slight second peak.
..    . In the case of competing adjective forms,
language has been said to change so as to rid itself of superfluous items, either by
discarding one of the forms or by assigning the two forms differing senses (Fowler
, s.v. -ic, -ical; Marchand :-). Some comments have been made on the
preference for either -ic or -ical in certain types of adjectives: e.g., according to
Sweet (:), -ic is preferred in forming adjectives from proper nouns and names
of races, as in Aristophanic, Byronic, and Slavic. Marchand (:) singles out a
group of adjectives mainly in -ic consisting of words with the basic sense ‘queer,
odd, spleeny’, including, e.g., frenzical, nonsensical, and quizzical. In general, whenever
there are pairs of adjectives in -ic/-ical, it has been claimed that the forms in -ic are
semantically closer to the base word, whereas with the -ical forms the connection is
vaguer (Fowler & Fowler , s.v. -al), and based on this idea Marchand (:)
38
 
suggested that scientists are more prone to use the shorter forms than non-scientists
(see also Zandvoort :-). The first grammarian to comment on the -ic/-ical
variation was Elphinston, who said that ‘ic is a foreign, and ical a domestic termination. The former therefore is used upon solemn, the latter on familiar occasions;
as seraph seraphic or seraphical, microscope microscopic or microscopical. Where the
subject then is naturally solemn, the solemn ending prevails; and where familiar, the
familiar. So we say almost only majestic, miltonic, from majesty, Milton, &c. and whimsical, finical, from whimsy, fine, &c.’ (Elphinston :–). All these comments
are worthy of closer examination, both from a diachronic and synchronic viewpoint.
More recently, studies have been also made on semantically differentiated pairs in
-ic/-ical, including Marsden () and Kaunisto ().
Görlach comments on the linguistic experimentation of – that ‘this proliferation was not cut back until the late seventeenth/eighteenth centuries, as a
consequence of natural selection or as a result of grammarians’ or lexicographers’ prescriptivism’ (Görlach :). As mentioned earlier, in addition to the ending of the
‘proliferation’, redundant items were dropped from use: Earle (:) observed in
his discussion on discarding forms in -ical (e.g., domestical, Germanical, magnifical)
that this practice as regards -ic/-ical adjectives was not uniform, saying that ‘it almost
excites a surprise to find that after all we have been rather arbitrary in our discontinuance of some, while we have continued to use others whose case is nowise different’,
examples of surviving forms being periodical, statistical, surgical, etc.
We could then raise the following questions:
.
.
.
Is there anything to explain which of the adjective pairs were ‘dealt with’ by either
dropping one of the forms or by semantic differentiation? Why would, for example, semantic differentiation have been a better or more natural way to get rid of
redundancy in the case of some adjectives than with some others?
If one of the forms is dropped from use, why is it that with some adjectives
it is the form in -ic (e.g., we do not usually use the form mathematic, but
mathematical), and then with some others the -ical form is dropped (e.g.,
tragic instead of tragical)?
How drastic or quick were the changes in the use of such adjective pairs?
.        -  
. To investigate the changes in the use of -ic/-ical adjective pairs in earlier
centuries, the most suitable material to use at the moment is the prose section of the
Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online text collection, a commercially available corpus.
This is simply because there are no other corpora available from this period that
would be large enough—the prose section of the Literature Online contains altogether
approximately  million words2. What needs to be mentioned is that the choice of
this material for the study means, of course, that we are only dealing with fiction,
and the results may not be exactly the same if texts of other genres were examined.
        -  -
majestic
–
–
–
–
–
–






()
()
()
()
()
()
majestical
 ()
 ()
 ()
—
—
 ()
39
Number of authors
using both forms



Table . The numbers of occurrences of majestic/majestical in Literature Online.
The prose section of the Chadwyck-Healey collection covers the period between 
and . As the corpus was obviously not compiled especially to meet the requirements
of linguistic corpus research, it may not be ideal as regards its structure. The use of -ic/ical pairs in the corpus was analysed in blocks of  years. It is important to note the
numbers of books and authors included in the corpus: the numbers of books in different  year blocks varied from  to , and the numbers of authors from  to 
(a curious exception is the period –, which has  books by only  authors). In
addition, texts by anonymous writers were not included in the analysis. Partly as a result
of this decision, the number of books/authors in the corpus from the first half of the
th century was so small that this period was left out of the analysis entirely.
After making online searches of -ic/-ical adjectives, based largely on Lehnert’s
() reverse dictionary, I studied the use of those adjective pairs which were the
most frequent in the corpus, i.e., occurring frequently enough so that observations
could be made on them. Thus the analysis did not consider adjectives which did not
have an existing counterpart in -ic or -ical. The analysed adjectives include angelic(al),
authentic(al), comic(al), domestic(al), fantastic(al), heroic(al), magic(al), majestic(al),
philosophic(al), poetic(al), tragic(al), and tyrannic(al). Of these adjectives, authentic/
authentical had the smallest numbers of occurrences, with  instances of authentic
and  instances of authentical. Pairs with a smaller number of total occurrences in
the corpus were excluded from the analysis. It has to be noted again that if other
genres were examined, the most frequently occurring -ic/-ical adjective pairs could
perhaps be different.
Firstly, attention could be paid to the numbers of occurrences of majestic/majestical
in the Literature Online corpus, presented in Table . In Table , the numbers given under
the adjective forms denote the absolute number of occurrences of the forms in different fifty-year periods, and the numbers in parentheses denote the numbers of authors
using the adjectives. On the right hand side of the table are the numbers of those
authors who were using both forms. As far as the semantics of the adjectives here
are concerned, both majestic and majestical were used in the same meanings, as can
be seen in examples () a and b (see also OED, s.vv.), found in the Literature Online
corpus:
40
 
authentic authentical
–
–
–
–
–
–
—
 ()
 ()
 ()
 ()
 ()
Number of authors
using both forms
 ()
 ()
 ()
—
—
—
Table . The numbers of occurrences of authentic/authentical in Literature Online.
() a. Though her Beauty had (while present) suspended Cha-abas Passion
towards the Sultana for that time, he had no sooner retired from her
Company, but that the Sultana presented her self, to his Imagination, with
all those Perfections, and that Majestick Grace which always accompany
her. (Peter Bellon, The Court Secret (), )
b. …they arriued shortly at the place of triumph, into which entring, bowing
her selfe vnto her horse necke, vnto those she first met, she passed her
horse by ye tilt, with such a countenance, and maiestical grace, that euery
one admired, both her persone, and good demeanour… (Henry Roberts,
Honovrs Conquest (), )
In the periods when both forms were actively used, there were no signs in the texts
of clear preference for the use of either form in any particular sense or collocation.
Similarly, there seemed to be no significant difference as to the positioning of the
adjectives: both forms appeared roughly with the same relation in attributive and
predicative positions. It can be seen from Table  that in the latter half of the th
century, the -ical form was more common—and this seems to be the case with most
of the -ic/-ical adjective pairs examined—but later in the th century, the use of the
shorter form became more popular, and the -ical forms less frequent towards the end
of the th century, finally almost disappearing. In present-day English, majestical is
indeed quite rare. So here we would have evidence of a clear shift from -ical to -ic
forms, with no apparent trends of semantic differentiation, but merely one of dropping the forms in -ical from use.
Interestingly enough, the same kind of change—both as regards the synonymous
use of the forms and the time when one can perceive a shift in favor of the shorter
forms—can be seen, for example, with the adjective pairs authentic/authentical and
heroic/heroical, as is evident from Tables  and .
A notable feature in Table  is the numbers of authors using both forms, especially in the period -, when almost all of the writers who used the adjectives
heroic/heroical were using them interchangeably, as e.g., Alexander Hart in examples
()a and b:
        -  -
heroic
–
–
–
–
–
–






()
()
()
()
()
()
heroical






()
()
()
()
()
()
41
Number of authors
using both forms





Table . The numbers of occurrences of heroic/heroical in Literature Online.
–
–
–
–
–
–
tragic
tragical












()
()
()
()
()
()
()
()
()
()
()
()
Number of authors
using both forms






Table . The numbers of occurrences of tragic/tragical in Literature Online.
() a. This grave Senator had a Sonne who bearing his name, disagreed not from
his properties, but punctually had his Fathers heroicke inclinations, which
made him as happy as meritorious, and was no lesse honoured of all
men… (Alexander Hart, Alexto and Angelina (), –)
b. …Sandrico for the better satisfaction of his friend and himselfe, begun to
enquire and demand of the Inhabitants what they could informe him concerning the heroicall inclination of this Roman Goddesse,… (Alexander
Hart, Alexto and Angelina (), )
It seems justifiable to say then that with some adjective pairs ending in -ic and -ical,
there was a noticeable shift from the use of -ical forms to the -ic forms in the th
century, although during this period, as could be concluded from the OED chart in
Figure , new words in -ical were still coined. This is particularly interesting in the
light of the comments made by Earle (), as the tendency to discard the existing
forms in -ical appears to have started earlier than he had assumed. In fact, it appears
to have begun before the use of the suffix as a productive derivational pattern had
gone out of fashion.
On the other hand, we do not get similar results to these when examining pairs such
as tragic/tragical and tyrannic/tyrannical, as seen in Table  and Table  (overleaf), conforming with Earle’s observation of the adjective pairs’ behaviour not being uniform.
42
 
tyrannic
–
–
–
–
–
–
—
—
 ()
 ()
 ()
 ()
tyrannical






()
()
()
()
()
()
Number of authors
using both forms




Table . The numbers of occurrences of tyrannic/tyrannical in Literature Online.
–
–
–
–
–
–
philosophic philosophical Number of authors
using both forms
—
 ()
—
 ()

 ()
 ()

 ()
 ()

 ()
 ()

 ()
 ()

Table . The numbers of occurrences of philosophic/philosophical in Literature Online.
In the case of tragic/tragical, the longer form is in present-day English rare when
compared to tragic. From a temporal viewpoint, however, the developments with this
word pair do not seem to go along the same lines as with the adjective pairs discussed
earlier, as the form in -ical appears to have survived well into the th century. With
tyrannic/tyrannical, the -ic form enters the scene in the latter part of the th century,
but the status of the longer form never became threatened, and today tyrannical is
clearly the favored form.
Even more interesting changes can be found in the use of philosophic/philosophical,
the numbers occurrences given in Table . In the latter half of the th century, the
shorter form became more common, but during this period the two forms were
used differently: philosophic in this period was more often used in a wider, more
popularized meaning, appearing in phrases such as a philosophic manner or a philosophic look/expression. When referring to things pertaining to philosophy as a science, with collocating words such as research, theories or argumentation, philosophical
was clearly the preferred form. After that period, however, this semantic distinction
began to disappear, and philosophical became the more common form in all senses
used—and in present-day English, one can still occasionally come across instances
of the shorter form, but philosophical is considerably more frequent. In this case we
would then actually encounter both processes of getting rid of redundancy, semantic
differentiation and dropping one of the forms from use.
        -  -
43
One may wonder why adjective pairs seem to differ so much in their behavior as
regards either differentiation between the forms or dropping one of the forms. If there
was a shift from -ical to -ic in the th century, why did it affect only some adjective
pairs, and not all of them? One possibility could be in the meanings of the base words,
as proposed by Elphinston (). While nothing in the use of the examined adjectives in the corpus suggests that the use of either the -ic or -ical form depended in any
way on the ‘familiarity’ or ‘solemn nature’ of the occasion (as Elphinston also argued),
the semantic aspects of the words themselves do provide a common feature. For example, angelic(al), heroic(al), and majestic(al) seem to have more in common with each
other than with philosophic(al) or poetic(al), the shared component being the semantic
aspect of nobility. If this indeed were the case, an interesting conclusion would be that
the meaning, the solemn nature of the base word itself might have had an effect in the
choice of how to get rid of redundancy: not semantic differentiation, but dropping
the forms in -ical from use. Although Elphinston did not specifically comment on the
language actually changing as regards the use of the two suffixes, his observations on
the matter—somewhat surprisingly not referred to since by lexicographers or grammarians—would seem to find partial support from the material examined.
Based on the Literature Online material alone, it might be early to suggest classifications of -ic/-ical adjectives according to the changes in their use, but presented
below is a preliminary suggestion of such a classification, showing that adjectives
having the semantic component of nobility could, in fact, be observed as behaving in
the same way. This tendency is further strengthened in the corpus by the adjective
pairs prophetic(al) and seraphic(al), which, although not as frequent as the other pairs
in group , nevertheless show a similar shift from -ical to -ic.
I.
shift from -ical to -ic in the th century or early th century—
  
a. base word has the semantic characteristic of nobility or grace: angelic(al),
authentic(al), heroic(al), majestic(al), prophetic(al), seraphic(al)
b. others: domestic(al)
II. # of occurrences in -ic increases (in the th century)—
 —both forms remain in use
a. the form in -ic stronger/usual: comic(al), fantastic(al), magic(al)
b. the form in -ical stronger/usual: poetic(al)
III. # of occurrences in -ic increases, but the -ical form remains the usual form–
  
tyrannic(al)
IV. the form in -ic becomes more frequent— —
followed by a shift back to -ical, with   
philosophic(al)
V. shift from -ical to -ic after the first half of the th century—
  
tragic(al)
44
 
. . It could be said that obviously more research has to be done on the
-ic/-ical adjectives in the Early Modern English period as well as other periods so as to
include more adjective pairs in the classification—and there would probably be even
more classes than the ones suggested here. The findings from the Literature Online
corpus does not obviously give us answers for all of the questions about the use of
-ic/-ical adjectives, but they do suggest that there have been a number of different currents of change. The observation made on adjectives such as angelic(al), heroic(al),
and majestic(al), sheds new light on the matter of competition between these two derivational patterns in that in cases where both forms have already existed, the semantic
aspects of the adjectives themselves may be considered to have affected the application of one of language’s ‘self-purifying’ tendencies, in this case attrition instead of
differentiation.
1
2
Excluded from the investigation were of course those words which actually were prefixed
forms of already existing words in -ic/-ical.
This figure refers to the prose fiction databases of the Literature Online as they were in
February —the th century fiction database has been since completed to include
works from  to .
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