2. Productivity in linguistics
The term “productivity” is used in a wide variety of
contexts.
Syntactic rules are “productive” in the sense that they
can be used to generate new phrases.
The same can be said of some morphological rules.
A linguistic process is productive if:
It can be used to produce novel forms.
If a rule is productive, then:
Novel forms (previously unheard) can be understood and
4. Definitions
Definition:2
Productivity refers to “the property of an affix or a
morphological process [word-formation rule,] to give rise to
new [word] formations.
Definition:3
Productivity can be seen as the possibility of morphological-
rules or affixes to be used in the production or
comprehension of new word-forms.
Definition:4
A word-formation rule or affix is considered productive if it
has the ability to coin new words by other word-formation
processes. In contrast, if it is unproductive, new coinages
5. Productive versus non-productive
Not all affixes possess this property to the same degree,
some affixes do not possess it at all.
For example, that nominal -th (as in length) can only
attach to a small number of specified words, but cannot
attach to any other words beyond that set.
This suffix can therefore be considered unproductive.
Even among affixes that can in principle be used to coin
new words, there seem to be some that are more
productive than others. For example, the suffix -ness (as
cuteness) gives rise to many more new words.
6. Other Scholars on Productivity
Hockett (1958) defines productivity as a “property of
language which allows us to say things which have
never been said before” .
Shultink (1961) views productivity as the possibility for
users of a language to unintentionally produce a (more
or less) uncountable number of formations.
Bauer (2001) claims that productivity is a property of the
affix or a morphological process that is used in order to
produce "[word-] formations on a systemic basis” .
Baayen (2012) says “the term 'morphological
productivity' is generally used informally to refer to the
number of words [the type frequency of an affix] in use
in a language community that a rule describes”.
7. Example of Productivity
Example-1
Imagine an English adjective happy. How would you
derive a noun out of this adjective?
Many speakers might say happiness.
This suggests that –ness suffixation is a productive
derivational process.
Example-2
-s (books) plural and –en (children) plural in English.
In this example –s is productive and –en in unproductive.
8. Possible and actual words
A possible, or potential, word can be defined as a
word whose semantic, morphological or phonological
structure is in accordance with the rules and regularities
of the language.
For example, it seems that all transitive verbs can be
turned into adjectives by the attachment of -able. Thus,
affordable, readable, manageable are all possible
words.
Notably, these forms are also semantically transparent,
i.e. their meaning is predictable on the basis of the
word-formation rule according to which they have been
formed.
Predictability of meaning is therefore another property
9. Actual words can be defined as the words that are in
use.
In the case of the potential words affordable, readable,
manageable, these words are also actual words,
because they have already been coined and used by
speakers.
But not all possible words are existing words, because,
to use again the example of -able, the speakers of
English have not coined -able derivatives on the basis
of each and every transitive verb of English.
10. Measuring productivity
To measure the productivity of an affix, a number of productivity
measures have been proposed.
There is one quantitative measure that is probably the most
widely used and the most widely rejected at the same time.
According to this measure, the productivity of an affix can be
discerned by counting the number of attested different words
with that affix at a given point in time. This has also been called
the type-frequency of an affix.
The severe problem with this measure is that there can be
many words with a given affix, but nevertheless speakers will
not use the suffix to make up new words.
An example of such a suffix is -ment, which in earlier centuries
led to the coinage of hundreds of then new words. Many of
these are still in use, but today’s speakers hardly ever employ -
ment to create a new word and the suffix should therefore be
11. Constraining productivity
All potentially useful words are actually not created and
used, which means that there must be certain restrictions
at work.
Restrictions that originate in problems of language use
(so-called pragmatic restrictions) and those restrictions
that originate in problems of language structure (so-called
structural restrictions).
12. 1- Pragmatic restrictions
The most obvious of the usage-based factors influencing
productivity is fashion.
The rise and fall of affixes like mega-, giga-, mini- or -nik is
an example of the result of extra-linguistic developments in
society which make certain words or morphological
elements desirable to use.
The problem with pragmatic restrictions is that, given a
seemingly impossible new formation, it is not clear whether
it is ruled out on structural grounds or on the basis of
pragmatic considerations.
13. 2- Structural Restrictions
Structural restrictions in word-formation may concern the
traditional levels of linguistic analysis, i.e. phonology,
morphology, semantics and syntax.
For Example Phonological restrictions:
Noun-forming -al
arrive - arrival but enter - *enteral
betray - betrayal but promise - *promiseal
construe - construal but manage - *manageal
deny - denial but answer - *answeral
propose - proposal but forward - *forwardal
Above examples illustrate a stress-related restriction. Nominal
-al only attaches to verbs that end in a stressed syllable.
14. A second example of phonological restrictions can be seen
in the following, which lists typical verbal derivatives in -en,
alongside with impossible derivatives.
verb-forming -en
A) blacken - black
Fatten - fat
Lengthen - long/length
Loosen - loose
Widen - wide
B) *finen - fine
*dullen - dull
*highen - high
*lowen - low
Above examples show that suffixation of verbal -en is subject to a
segmental restriction.
The last sound (or ‘segment’) of the base can be /k/, /t/, /T/, /s/, /d/,
but must not be /n/, /N/, /l/, or a vowel.
15. Morphological restrictions:
Apart from being sensitive to phonological constraints,
affixes can be sensitive to the morphological structure of
their base words.
An example of such a morphological constraint at work is
the suffix combination -ize-ation.
Virtually every word ending in the suffix -ize can be turned
into a noun only by adding -ation.
Other conceivable nominal suffixes, such as -ment, -al, -
age etc., are ruled out by this morphological restriction
imposed on -ize derivatives (cf., for example, colonization
16. Blocking
The term ‘blocking’ has been mainly used to refer to two
different types of phenomena, shown below;
a. thief - *stealer
b. liver ‘inner organ’ - *liver ‘someone who lives’
We can argue that *stealer is impossible because there is
already a synonymous competing form thief available. In the
above example (b) the case is different in the sense that the
derived form *liver ‘someone who lives’ is homonymous to an
already existing non-complex form liver ‘inner organ’.
In both cases one speaks of ‘blocking’, with the existing form
blocking the creation of a semantically or phonologically
