Morphology (04) : Morphological Productivity

a)      Definition of morphological productivity

ü  It is the relative freedom with which a morphological process may occur. For example, blending is a productive process in English, but infixation is not.

ü  It is a morphological pattern or rule is productive if it can be applied to new bases to create new words.

b)      The productivity of a pattern may be limited in various ways: phonologically, semantically, pragmatically and morphologically. Here are the restrictions on word formation rules:

1.      Phonological Restriction

Phonological restriction is particularly common with derivational suffixes, much less so with prefixes and compounding. For the example, we can find the kind of restriction rules out repetition on identical features. The first is the repetition of the phoneme // (spelled ll) in Spanish (which reduces the domain of the diminutive suffix –illo.  

The second is the repetition of the vowel /i(:)/ in English (which reduces the domain of the suffix –ee.

Somewhat similar is the requirement that the derived word must have an alternating rhythm (strong–weak–strong). As a result, the English suffix –ize freely attaches to bases with a strong–weak rhythm, but does not attach to bases that end in a strong (i.e. stressed) syllable. (The suffix -ese behaves similarly, as we saw in the previous section.)

Phonological restriction can also be purely random. These are the examples but not one with an (obvious) phonetic motivation.

2.      Semantic Restriction

In word formation rules may have semantic restriction that seem quit arbitrary. For example, the Russian quality – non suffix –stvo combines with adjectives that donate properties of human beings, not with adjectives denoting physical properties of object. Here are the examples and there is not intrinsic reason why –stvo should not combine with other adjectives.

3.      Pragmatic Restriction

If we want to be phonologically and semantically well-formed, a neologism must also be useful, and this is what the means of pragmatic restriction. Pragmatic is study of language within a social and discourse context. For example, we can take from the usage of female noun in German language. There, German do not generally accept female nouns in -in denoting lower animals (Käferin ‘female beetle’, Würmin ‘female worm’). It seems clear that these gaps in the German lexicon are due to a pragmatic restriction.

4.      Morphological Restriction

Some morphological patterns require special morphological properties in the base. For example, Modern Hebrew has a pattern for action nouns (CiC(C)uC) that is applied only to verbs of one particular inflection class (CiC(C)eC). Verbs of other inflection classes (CaCaC, hiCCiC, etc.) cannot form their action nouns in this way.

Then, in Russian we can find the combination between the female-noun suffix –ja and only with bases that are themselves derived by the suffix –un.

Some other female-noun suffix (-ka, -ša, -inja, -isa) should be used for all of other noun. For example:

5.      Borrowed Vocabulary Strata

Sometimes a pattern is productive only within a borrowed vocabulary stratum.

A borrowed vocabulary stratum is the kind of borrowing a word from other language that will be the new vocabulary for that country. The example is the word orang-utan. This word is formed from (Malay: orang ‘man’, utan ‘forest’). the English word orangutan is monomorphemic, although this is a compound noun in the source language. When a language borrows many morphologically complex words from the same language, their morphological structure may be preserved, and their patterns may become productive in the target language.

c)      Productivity and The Lexicon

The structure of the lexicon is also a likely factor. Patterns with high memory strength (by virtue of being frequently accessed in the lexicon) tend also to be more productive. High frequency words can block newly coined words with the same meaning. Finally, lexical gangs and other patterns with low token frequency can be (quasi-) productive because they are phonologically densely clustered in the lexicon.

d)     Measuring productivity

Various quantitative measures of productivity have been proposed; the corpus measures based on hapax legomena (P and P*) are increasingly used.