From Productive -ness Word-Formation to Creative Suffix -iness: The Case of Truthiness

This corpus-based study examines both semantic and syntactic properties of the 2005 coinage truthiness from a cognitive perspective, contrasting it with typical behaviors usually attributed to -ness nouns in the literature. Typical X-ness nouns tend to signal cognitive commitment of the speaker/experiencer whose specific viewpoint and perception of a high degree of X motivates such concretizing nominalization. A typical construction of -ness noun phrases has X-ness as head and the external argument of X mentioned in a post-head dependent (e.g. the beautifulness of the night). Motivated by irony and critical distance, truthiness behaves differently—a generic reading is triggered, conveyed by a lack of concrete salience for its base truthy. It can thus be characterized as a creative use of -ness nominalization rather than a productive one.