Abstract
The related notions of possible word, actual word and productivity are difficult to work with because of the difficulty with the notion of actual word. When large corpora are used as a source of data, there are some benefits for the practising morphologist, but the notion of actual word becomes even more difficult. This is because it rapidly becomes clear that in corpora there may be more than one form for the same morphosemantic complex, so that rules may have multiple outputs. One of the factors that may help determine the output of a variable rule in morphology is the productivity of the process involved. If that is the case, the notion of productivity has to be reevaluated.
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Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on Data-Rich Approaches to English Morphology, held in Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2012. I should like to thank attendees at the conference, Liza Tarasova and Natalia Beliaeva, and referees for Morphology for feedback on earlier versions, and Jonathan Newton for the example in (2). The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand through its Marsden Fund to the author.
In the case of conversion I assume that this still applies, in that the ‘simpler word’ has not undergone the identity operation which creates the derivative. Clearly, an alternative position would be possible, in which case the characterization of a rule given here would have to be modified slightly.
OED. The Oxford English dictionary on-line. www.oed.com.
Referees for Morphology rightly query the use of the term ‘infinite’ in this context, yet Chomsky (1975:78) talks of “an infinite set of grammatical utterances”, Fromkin et al. (1999:9) of “an infinite set of new sentences” and Carnie (2007:16) says “Language is a productive (probably infinite) system”, including in his reasoning that sentences can always be extended by the addition of an extra sub-part. Perhaps words cannot always be so extended. I find Matthews (1979:24) helpful: “A generativist says that the speaker’s mind controls an infinite set of sentences. But this is not a statement of observed fact. It is part of a theory.”
And can be attested at http://qahatesyou.com/wordpress/category/philosophy/ (accessed 9 Jan 2013).
Indeed, even the Japanese example below may not stand up to close scrutiny, since Miyagawa notes a slightly different function for the two causative markers, despite their shared form and shared meaning.
There is some variability as to the resyllabification of the final <r> in English: manageress shows no resyllabification, and this is not simply a matter of whether we are dealing with -er or -or, since we find doctoress, mayoress and waitress. The -erer sequence can be found in forms like adulterer (where only one of the -er sequences is an independent morph) or in fruiterer, which is unusual in its structure, and not obviously productive.
Unfuckingremarkable is apparently (Google) less remarkable than unrefuckingmarkable, despite claims in the literature that the placement of expletives in such words is largely prosodically determined.
The distinction between e.g. deduct and deduce as corresponding to deduction (in the Sherlock Holmes sense of deduction, not the arithmetical one) is usually discussed as formation versus back-formation. This assumes a model where speakers always go from the morphologically simpler to the morphologically more complex when coining words. Speakers make a large number of what would normatively be called ‘errors’ in the stress patterns on verbs because they try to retain the stress pattern from a morphologically more complex derivative in the morphologically simpler verb. That is we hear forms like propagáte rather than the expected própagate, presumably influenced by propagátion. At the very least this calls into question the way in which real speakers operate.
Baayen and Lieber have the frequency of new morphologically simplex words as the baseline, above which things count as productive, which is a much better justified level and rather more inclusive than this proposal, which is really just included to allow for the argument.
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Bauer, L. Grammaticality, acceptability, possible words and large corpora. Morphology 24, 83–103 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9234-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9234-z