Morphological Productivity
Morphological Productivity
Morphological Productivity is a 2001 book by Laurie Bauer about how productive English word formation is. The book asks several key questions in its introduction: how to tell the difference between productivity and creativity, whether productivity can be measured, how productivity relates to how often a word is used and what it means, and whether unproductive processes lead to ungrammatical forms.
Chapter highlights:
- Chapter 2: A historical look at studies of productivity. Bauer discusses whether productivity is an all-or-nothing concept or something gradual, and introduces ideas like restricted and semi-productivity. He argues that frequency, semantic fit, and the ability to create a new word tend to be prerequisites for productivity, rather than productivity itself.
- Chapter 3: A provisional definition of productivity is offered.
- Chapter 4: Psycholinguistic evidence about how people process productive word forms.
- Chapter 5: The role of large text databases (corpora) in studying and determining productivity.
- Chapter 6: The development and variation of productive morphological processes across history and languages.
- Chapter 7: Several formulas proposed to measure productivity are reviewed. Bauer concludes that there is no single, clear, reliable method to determine productivity yet, but he does provide some useful observations.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:32 (CET).