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

Semi-productivity (David Crystal Semi-productive forms are those where there is a limited or occasional creativity. There are special category of affixes that suffer some vague connectivity. as when a prefix such as un- is sometimes, but not universally, applied to words to form their opposites, e.g. happy → unhappy, but not sad → *unsad." The reason for such restrictions on possible bases are historical: with –ant originating from Latin, it can only be connected to words from the same origin.


Productivity and creativity
In linguistics, the term productivity is connected to creativity in the sense that the number of words skilled speakers can create is not restricted, but rather infinite.
The unconscious nature of the formation of new words is not merely a typical property of highly productive rules, but should be a necessary criterion for regarding a rule as productive (Haspelmath & Sims 2010). According to this view, there is a sharp distinction between productivity and creativity.
When a rule is very productive, neologisms formed by that rule are hardly noticed by speakers, hearers and lexicographers. For instance, English adjectives with the suffix -less can be formed quite freely as childless, joyless, shoeless. An example of a creative neologism would be the word mentalese which means the mental language of our thoughts. In brief, a productive rule allows speakers to form new words unconsciously and unintentionally, whereas creative neologisms are always intentional formations that follow an unproductive pattern.

Creativity is manifested in two ways:

Rule-goverened creativity
Rule bending creativity. It means that speakers are able to extent their lexicon by forming words idiomatically without subconsciously following rules. Haspelmath, M., & Sims, A. (2010).
Restrictions on productivity
Lieber (2015) stated that , "The more limitations there are on the bases available to a lexeme formation process, the less productive it will be". In many cases, we can give specific reasons why a word-formation rule does not give rise to words that it might be expected to permit. For example, the English suffix -ity systematically fails to combine with adjectives ending in -ish, -y and -ful (*hopefulity). In other words, the rules of -ity have restricted domains. it is clear that restrictions on the domain of a rule significantly limit the coining of new words.
There are different sorts of restrictions on what sorts of base an affix might attach to Lieber, R. (2015)., including:
• Categorial restrictions: Almost all affixes are restricted to bases of specific categories. For example, -ity and -ness attach to adjectives, -ize attaches to nouns and adjectives, or un- attaches to adjectives or verbs.
• The meaning of the base: For example, negative un- prefers bases that are not themselves negative in meaning. We find unlovely but not *unugly, unhappy but not *unsad

• Phonological restrictions: Sometimes affixes will attach only to bases that fit certain phonological patterns. Phonological restrictions on the domain of a word-formation rule are particularly common with derivational suffixes Haspelmath, M., & Sims, A. (2010). The suffix -en, which forms verbs from adjectives, attaches only to bases that end in obstruents (stops, fricatives, and affricates). So we can get darken, brighten, and deafen but *slimmen and *tallen, which end in sonorant consonants, are impossible. In some cases, certain complex words are impossible because they would create difficulties for phonetic processing (i.e. pronunciation or perception). A common restriction rules out the repetition of identical features, e.g. the repetition of the vowel /i:/ in English ,which reduces the domain of the suffix -ee .

The English suffix -ize freely attaches to bases with a strong–weak rhythm, but does not attach to bases that end in a strong ,stressed syllable because of the requirement that the derived word must have an alternating rhythm (strong–weak–strong).



Reference
Crystal, D.(2008). Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th ed. Blackwell.
Haspelmath, M., & Sims, A. (2010). Understanding morphology. Routledge.
Katamba‏
Lieber, R. (2015). Introducing morphology. Cambridge University Press.
Nordquist. R. (2017). Productivity :Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms –
Definition and Examples. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/prod uctivity-language-1691541 .