The morphological productivity of selected ... - Helda - Helsinki.fi

the set of possible words becomes practically infinite (Haspelmath 2002: 110).
Anshen and Aronoff have also found out that for highly productive wordformation
processes, the model gives a rather low productivity index, since the
number of possible words is, in theory, infinite (1981: 64). The most fundamental
problem with Aronoff’s model, though, is how to actually count the number of
possible words. Baayen (1992, 1993) has attempted to formalize Aronoff’s model
by introducing the potentiality measure I, which is the ratio of the number of
possible words S and the number of actual words V (the reverse of Aronoff’s
index) with a given affix.
The methods discussed above can be defined as quantifications, as
opposed to probabilistic measures (see Plag 1999: 24). Baayen and his
collaborators in particular (see, e.g.,Baayen 1992, 1993, 2009; Baayen and Lieber
1991;Chitashvili and Baayen 1993; Baayen and Renouf 1996) have developed a
number of statistical methods to measure productivity that make use of large textcorpora.
Most of the statistical measures to gauge productivity rely on the
notion of the hapax legomenon. The words hapax legomenon constitute a Greek
expression that has been adopted from classical studies, and it literally means
‘said (only) once’ (Carstairs-McCarthy 2002: 96). Hapax legomena (or just
‘hapaxes’) are words that occur only once in a certain corpus (Bauer 2005: 325).
With productive morphological processes a large number of low
frequency words is to be expected, because our mental lexicon “allows the
decomposition of the newly encountered word ... and thus the computation of the
meaning on the basis of the meaning of the parts” (Plag 2006: 542). Chitashvili
and Baayen call this kind of phenomenon a Large Number of Rare Events
(LNRE) distribution (1993: 57). 11 Unproductive processes, on the other hand, tend
to result in a large number of high-frequency words (Plag 2006: 542). In a similar
vein, the fact that a productive word-formation rule is available in the mental
lexicon guarantees that all complex words with that affix can be produced or
understood, even if they have a very low frequency (Baayen and Renouf 1996:
74). This implies that hapaxes can be said to be a good indicator of productivity.
11 How this distribution can be further used in the statistical study of productivity will be discussed
in section 2.3.3.
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