Productivity: A summary

We have discussed in some detail different notions of productivity and some of the pragmatic and structural mechanisms that are responsible for the systematic limitations on the productivity of a given process. Phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the elements involved may constrain the applicability of a process. The productivity measures developed by Baayen and his co-workers allow a more refined, operationalized determination of the different aspects of the applicability of a process in actual speech. These measures are however, only the starting point for investigations that try to explain the observed pattern (at least partially) in terms of linguistic structures.

As already mentioned above, the following parts deal with the question as to which structural restrictions must be incorporated into the derivational morphology of English. I will show that earlier accounts are often empirically inadequate, and that a better empirical description of individual processes provides answers also to some of the theoretical problems.

The processes to be discussed serve as test cases for the hypotheses given in (2g-2j), and the analysis suggests some interesting, though sometimes tentative, answers to the following questions: Which mechanisms are rule-based, which ones are general, which ones are affix-driven, which ones are base-driven? Do derivational rules necessarily refer to the syntactic category of the base? And should restrictions be formulated as output-oriented or input-oriented? With these questions in mind, we move on to the empirical investigations which deal with two central problems in (English) derivational morphology. The first is the combinability of suffixes, the other is the distribution of rival morphological processes.