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

2008: 902). As Plag has put it, it is “only a more or less accurate statement of the
problem and not a solution to it” (1999: 35). Therefore the potential productivity
P cannot be the only way to assess the productivity of the selected prefixes and
combining forms. In this study, methods of lexical statistics were used to offer an
account that is as diverse as possible and that takes into account the different
aspects of morphological productivity.
Another interesting topic for future research could involve
comparing the productivity rates of combining forms across different registers,
following the example of Plag et al. (1999). Many Greek prefixes in particular are
relatively recent loans in English and are mainly used in word-formation in
specialized scientific registers (Biber et al. 1999: 324). The problem with that kind
of research is that the samples compared must be of equal size, which, as Säily
has noted, may lead to discarding valuable data (2011: 125). On the other hand,
studying the correlation of productivity and different sociolinguistic variables,
such as gender, age or social rank of the speakers (see Säily and Suomela 2009,
Säily 2011), is also worth further study. Another aspect of productivity that has
not been thoroughly investigated yet is the competition between different wordformation
processes that express the same need to name various concepts and
phenomena (see Lüdeling et al. 2006).
In the future, more theoretical accounts of productivity are also
needed: lately, studies of productivity have mainly concentrated on the
productivity of individual word-formation processes (see Dressler and Ladányi
2000: 104). Besides, even though the development of different empirical and
statistical methods to measure productivity has flourished in the past few years,
there are still many questions that concern the very nature of productivity that
need to be tackled. Plag, for example, mentions such problems as allomorphy and
the relationship between rival morphological processes, as well as how
morphology interacts with phonology, syntax, and semantics (1999: 1). In
addition, the study of productivity might have practical applications beyond
morphology, measuring the “generative potential” (Evert/Baroni) of such things
as syntactic processes or collocations/idioms. LNRE models in particular are also
an area that has not so far been widely employed in the study of productivity.
Kastovsky argues that instead of considering the demarcation
between combining forms and affixation, a more relevant question would actually
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