Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Libyan Academy for postgraduate studies / Misurata Branch

Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research
Libyan Academy for postgraduate studies / Misurata Branch
School of languages
Department of Applied linguistics

Course Title: Morphology

Research paper's topic: productivity

Written By: Layla M. El-Kabier

Submitted to / Dr. Bashir Al- Shawish
Fall 2018/2019

The Content

Productivity in morphology

Productive and non-productive patterns

Semi-productivity
Productivity and creativity
Restrictions on productivity

Productivity in morphology
The notion of Productivity in linguistics is defined by Nordquist (2017) as " The limitless ability to use language." Also known as open-endedness or creativity. It refers to the fact that potential number of utterances in any human language is infinite. However, in its narrower sense, productivity is used to refer to a particular forms or constructions that can produce new instances of the same type such as Affixes.
According to Catamba (1993) , there are two key points that are required to measure the generality of a word-formation process.
Degree : no process is so general that affects all the bases it could apply to.
Dimension of time: a process of word-formation changes its generality during time. The productivity of a pattern can change. Until recently, the adverb-forming suffix -wise was unproductive and confined to a handful of cases such as likewise, clockwise, lengthwise and otherwise. But today it has become highly productive, and we frequently coin new words like healthwise, moneywise.)

Productive and Nonproductive Patterns

"A pattern is productive if it is repeatedly used in language to produce further instances of the same type (e.g. the past-tense affix -ed in English is productive, in that any new verb will be automatically assigned this past-tense form).

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  "[T]he plural affix 's' which is added onto the base form of nouns is productive because any new noun which is adopted into English will employ it, whereas the change from foot to feet is unproductive because it represents a fossilized plural form limited to a small set of nouns." (Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms, and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
  
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  Non-productive (or unproductive) patterns lack any such potential; e.g. the change from mouse to mice is not a productive plural formation -- new nouns would not adopt it, but would use instead the productive -s-ending pattern.