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Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity

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Book cover Yearbook of Morphology 1991

Part of the book series: Yearbook of Morphology ((YOMO))

Abstract

Research into the phenomenon of morphological productivity, “the possibility for language users to coin, unintentionally, a number of formations which are in principle uncountable” (Schultink 1961), has mainly focused on the qualitative factors which jointly determine the productivity of word formation rules. It is well known that word formation processes are subject to various syntagmatic conditions. Booij (1977) develops a typology of such conditioning factors, distinguishing between rule-specific and rule-independent restrictions on the one hand, and between restrictions pertaining to phonological, stratal and syntactic characteristics on the other.1 The rôle of pardigmatic factors is discussed in van Marie (1985). He points out that (roughly) synonymous affixes tend to select their base words from complementary domains. Hence they can be analyzed as mutually affecting their respective degrees of productivity.

The author is indebted to Geert Booij, Pieter van Reenen, Rochelle Lieber and Ariane van Santen for valuable discussion on the linguistic interpretation of the statistics developed here, and Richard Gill and Rezo Chitašvili for their aid in coming to grips with the mathematics of frequency distributions. Finally, I have been able to benefit from discussions with Uli Frauenfelder, Rober Schreuder and Willem Levelt on the psycholinguistic aspects of productivity. All errors and follies in this paper remain the responsibility of the author.

This list should be extended with semantic conditioning factors. For instance, Zimmer (1964) points out that English un- tends not to attach to any base which is semantically negative (*unbad, *unsick, and Rainer (1988) calls attention to the fact that affixes deriving abstract quality nouns can only be attached to qualitative, but not to relational adjectives (compare goodness with *woodenness).

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  1. Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Harald Baayen

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  1. General Linguistics, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Geert Booij

  2. P.J. Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Seiences, The Netherlands

    Jaap van Marle

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Baayen, H. (1992). Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. In: Booij, G., van Marle, J. (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 1991. Yearbook of Morphology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2516-1_8

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