PRODUCTIVITY

Question 1

What is productivity?

Answer 1

productivity as a “generative capacity”,
possibility to create new, previously unheard
forms, often used intuitively, with no recourse to
objective measures

Question 2

What is linguistic creativity?

Answer 2

language provides the means for
expressing indefinitely many thoughts […] in an
indefinite range of new situations”,
-a combination of originality and appropriatness
 both syntax and morphology open-ended – there’s
no finite lists of potential words and sentences in
a language
-the more productive suffix is the more potential
bases it can be attached to

Question 3

How do we measure productivity?

Answer 3

Through corpora and dictionaries but they represent incomplete lists

Question 4

hapax lagomenom

Answer 4

 hapax legomenon (or hapax) – a word that
appears only once in a certain body of text
 typical unlexicalized words – indications of what
could be created by a particular process (i.e.
potential)
 productivity – diachronically variable, suffixes
that were more productive in the 19th century
(e.g. verbal -ate) are less productive now and vice
versa

Question 5

phonological constraints:

Answer 5

1-en suffix - mora bit monosyllabe i zavrsavat sa stopom i fricativeom
2.ly hapology lyly ponavljanje

Question 6

morphological constraints

Answer 6

• foreign affixes prefer foreign bases (ant)
• native affixes prefer native bases (hood)
• some are not selective (ish)
  1) verbs that end in -ze can only be nominalised by ation

Question 7

syntactic constraints

Answer 7

certain affixes are limited to bases of one morphosyntactic category

1) -re attached only to verbs
2) -able attached only to transitive verbs
3) -al attached only to nouns and bound roots

Question 8

semantic constraints

Answer 8

it is determined by the meaning

1) -de can only be detached to verbs that imply that an action can be inversed
2) two-carred family

Question 9

blocking(synonymy/semantic blocking)

Answer 9

It is unnecessary because the word with this meaning is already in place.
This is a principle of linguisitc economy but it is not bulletproof
This blocking method can also be seen in inflection with plurals for mouse mouses bcs it i not possible we have mice
An example of blocking in derivation would be thief blocks stealer
-there is no absolute blocking because competing pairs such as curiousity/curiousness

Question 10

formal generality and regularity

Answer 10

the suffix -ness is formally general meanig that when it is attached to most adjectives it makes more abstract nouns than ef th
The suffix ness is also formally regular meaning that one can specify what sort of structure an adjective must have in order to be a possible base for ness, and the answer is any, meaning whatever adjective ness is attached to it sounds like a possible noun