Morphology

Productivity and restrictions

Productivity-Definition,Aronoff and Anshen

'the extent to which a particular affix or word formation process is likely to be used in the production of new words in the language'

->Productivity is a probabilistic continuum that predicts the use of potential words.

At one hand of the continuum are the dead or completely unproductive affixes.

ex.suffix -th growth,truth

At the other hand are highly productive derivational suffixes

ex.-ness,-ation

In the middle there are the less productive derivational suffixes like -ity

->Productivity and word frequency.

It is difficult to say to which point they are related.Aronoff and Anshen say that

'the less productive a morphological pattern is,the more frequent on average its

individual members will be'.Frequency is also important in the selection of bases:

a less productive affix is often found attached to higher frequency-base words than

a more productive affix.

->Productive word formation competence involves the knowledge of a number of the

distributional rules that are applied to certain word formation elements:

phonological restrictions

ex.the morpheme -ish does not combine with nouns ending in ƒ or t ƒ (rubbishish,bitchish)

morphological restrictions

ex.the suffixations in -ness cannot be followed by any other suffix (kindnessless,akwardnessful)

semantic restrictions

ex.the suffixations in -ess only occur with nouns denoting human beings or higher animals(stewardess)

etymological restrictions

ex.the negative prefixes in- and dis- combine only with adjectives of Romance origin or that the prefix di- only combines with words of Latin or Greek origin.

Possible words-nonce formations-istitutionalized word

Possible or potential words

'They are words that correspond to the rules of English word formation but at the same time they are not used'....