Morphological Productivity (review)

In this book on morphological productivity, Laurie Bauer gives an extensive overview of the various definitions of productivity found in the morphological literature as well as a historical synopsis of the research and the debate on productivity within morphology. B discusses fundamental linguistic notions relevant to this issue, such as morphological processes, prior existence and attestation of words, lexicalization, frequency, semantic coherence, transparency, regularity, paradigm pressure, analogy, degrees of productivity, default, naturalness, markedness, creativity, and dichotomies such as competence vs. performance and synchrony vs. diachrony. B then suggests a tentative definition of productivity based on a dichotomy between creativity and productivity, viewing productivity as the potential of a morphological process to generate repetitive noncreative coinings (98–99).

Furthermore, B cites research on psycholinguistic experiments on storage of words in the lexicon and on production and comprehension of inflectional, derivational, and compound items and emphasizes the need to take productivity into account when interpreting the results of such experiments.

In particular, B discusses scalar productivity and some possible factors that may constrain it such as phonological factors, morphological factors, syntactic factors, semantic factors, lexical factors, pragmatic factors, aesthetic factors, and blocking. B also reviews the various mathematical procedures suggested in the literature as measurements of productivity. These are based on: (1) the ratio between actual items and potential items generated by a morphological process, (2) the token frequency of items occurring only once as compared to the total token frequency of all items generated by that morphological process in a corpus, and (3) the ratio between the number of items of a category which only occur once in a corpus and the total amount of items occurring only once. B suggests a measurement of productivity based on the rate of additions to a category generated by a morphological process over time.

B then gives examples of productivity from (Proto-)Germanic and English, focusing on affixes such as -dōm and -er, the formation of color words, and nominalizations in general in the history of English. All suggested measurements of productivity turn out to be problematic, either because they yield different results for the same word-formation processes or because there are practical difficulties associated with them. B concludes that restrictions on morphological processes need to be defined in terms of their domains of application and that such restrictions can often change over time, resulting in changes in productivity and patterns of productivity of the same affix. Standardization of a language can also be an influential factor.

Finally, B redefines his tentative definition of productivity, suggesting that it should be regarded as a complex concept, dividable into the two subconcepts ‘availability’ and ‘profitability’. The former captures the potential of a morphological process to generate repetitive noncreative forms and is a systemic factor. The latter is a nonsystemic concept, and it captures the degree to which an available morphological process is employed in real language use, yielding a varying amount of new lexical items being coined across affixes and time. B closes the book with a summary of his conclusions and extends the discussion to productivity within other fields of linguistics, such as syntax and phonology.

This book provides an excellent overview of research on productivity and should be read by every linguist working on the topic.