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

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1. Introduction<br />

Morphological <strong>productivity</strong>, the ability <strong>of</strong> speakers to coin new words using the<br />

resources <strong>of</strong> a given language, has received a great deal <strong>of</strong> attention in the past<br />

few decades, especially in the context <strong>of</strong> the English language. Bauer (2001) and<br />

Plag (1999), for example, <strong>of</strong>fer book-length accounts <strong>of</strong> this phenomenon.<br />

According to Bauer, “<strong>productivity</strong> remains one <strong>of</strong> the most contested areas in the<br />

study <strong>of</strong> word-formation” (1983: 62). Even though Bauer’s book was published<br />

almost thirty years ago and many new theories on <strong>morphological</strong> <strong>productivity</strong><br />

have been proposed since then, this statement still seems to be valid. Even though<br />

the concept <strong>of</strong> <strong>productivity</strong> seems to be easy to grasp intuitively, there are several<br />

practical and theoretical issues that have not yet been tackled.<br />

Baayen and his collaborators in particular have developed a number<br />

<strong>of</strong> empirical corpus-based methods to gauge <strong>productivity</strong> quantitatively (see, e.g.,<br />

Baayen 1992, 1993, 2009; Baayen and Lieber 1991; Chitashvili and Baayen 1993;<br />

Baayen and Renouf 1996). In addition, the psycholinguistic aspect <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>productivity</strong>, i.e., the way speakers store complex words in their mental lexicon,<br />

has received considerable attention since the early nineties. Important<br />

contributions have come from Frauenfelder and Schreuder (1992), Baayen (1993),<br />

and Hay and Baayen (2002).<br />

In addition to being an important theoretical concept, studying<br />

<strong>morphological</strong> <strong>productivity</strong> also has practical relevance. Measuring degrees <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>productivity</strong> is important from the point <strong>of</strong> view <strong>of</strong> writing grammars, for<br />

example. While unproductive processes are listed in the lexicon, productive<br />

patterns can be described by rules, and thus measuring <strong>productivity</strong> <strong>of</strong>fers<br />

valuable information on what processes should be given prominence in the case <strong>of</strong><br />

limited resources (Lüdeling et al. 2000: 57). <strong>The</strong> importance <strong>of</strong> the concept <strong>of</strong><br />

<strong>productivity</strong> can also be seen in the fact that computational tools cannot function<br />

properly unless they take productive word-formation into account (Baayen 2008:<br />

900). In addition, knowledge <strong>of</strong> the <strong>productivity</strong> <strong>of</strong> different word-formation<br />

processes may also be relevant in language teaching. Since combining forms are<br />

particularly frequent in scienti<strong>fi</strong>c registers, this study might also have some<br />

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