Productivity of the verbal inflectional classes

154 Natalia Gagarinamicroclasses (in a bottom-up manner) was proposed in Dressler & Gagarina (1999). 2 For thepurpose of the present contribution the four fully productive microclasses (henceforth, MC)and one slightly productive MC are listed below (in all productive MC the verbs mainly aremotivated by the nouns, except for MC 4, where another verb serves as the motivation base):MC 1: -a/aj (zavtraka-t´/zavtrakaj- ‘to have breakfast.inf/CS’, perestraiva-t’/perestraivaj- ‘torebuild.inf/CS’ iterative),MC 2: -ova/uj (komandova-t´/komanduj- ‘to command.inf/CS’) (MC 7 in the generalschemata of all verbal MC),MC 3: palatalised consonant + i/palatalised consonant (inžener’i-t´/inžener´- ‘to perform awork being an engineer.inf/CS’) (MC 17 in the general schemata),MC 4: pluriphonemic thematic suffix nu/deletion of the final vowel of the suffix (and OS ofthe past maintains suffix nu) (svistnu-t´/svistn- ‘to whistle once.inf/CS’) (MC 22 in thegeneral schemata), andslightly productive MC 5: -e/ej (zvere-t´/zverej- ‘to become very angry.inf/CS’, lit. zver’‘animal’), (MC 2 in the general schemata).2 Degrees of productivityProductivity of microclasses is gradual (as other assumptions of NM). The gradualness of theverb classes in Russian has been established on the basis of the criteria recapitulated below(cf. productivity in Baayen (1992); Marle (1992)):a) Wurzel's (1984) secondary productivity when loan words with unfitting properties areintegrated, i.e. the highest degree of inflectional productivity is obtained in order to integrateloan words,b) Wurzel's (1984) primary productivity in the integration of loan words with fittingproperties (only minor incompatibility of the unfitting properties has to be overcome, becausethe class-defining properties of the loan word already fit into the receiving microclass),c) hierarchically lower criterion is the assignment of indigenous neologisms formed byconversion, i.e. when no suffix of derivational morphology predetermines the choice ofinflectional class,d) hierarchically still lower criterion is inflection class change from a less to a moreproductive or stable microclass,e) word formation productivity of indigenous affixations (this is the last and hierarchicallylowest criterion, because it provides direct evidence of productivity only for word formation,whereas for inflection it proves only minimal stability).2 Similar microclasses form subclasses (sub(sub(sub))classes, if necessary), and these constitute macroclasses.We define an inflectional macroclass as the highest, most general type of class, which consists of severalhierarchically lower (sub)classes and microclasses.