Productivity

kinds of productivity

Tesxtbooks on linguistics, and particularly on word structure, usually introduce at an early stage a distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘un-productive’ word formation processes. Some readers may wonder why I have not done so before now, especially when discussing criteria for determining which words are lexical items, or the variety of plural and past tense forms in English. The reason why I have avoided the term so far is that ‘productivity’ is used to mean a variety of different things, and it seemed best to avoid the term entirely until any potential confusions could be. This risk of confusion does not mean that the notion of productivity is unhelpful. On the contrary, once the various senses are teased apart, the outcome turns out to shed light on the relationship between word formation and lexical listing, and to highlight an important respect in which word-structure differs from sentence-structure.

Productivity is closely tied to regularity, but regularity in shape has to be distinguished from regularity in meaning. These are dealt with respectively. One aspect of vocabulary in English and perhaps in all languages is a dislike of exact synonyms, and the implications of this for word formation deals with some semantic implications of the freedom with which compound nouns are formed in English. Numerical measures of productivity are touched on, draws attention to the lack of any comparable notion in syntax.