Productivity

Georgette Dal (1) , Fiammetta Namer (2)

1 STL - Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163
2 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

Both qualitative (as in Schultink 1961) and quantitative (as in Baayen 1992) definitions of productivity have been widely commented upon and disputed. In what follows, we first outline the general principles and main definitions relating to this notion, with classic examples from the literature as well as new ones taken from French (section 2). This section provides an opportunity to consider qualitative and quantitative approaches to the concept. In section 3, we explain why productivity is a central concept in morphology and describe factors that may influence productivity: word internal complexity, its either formal or semantic (ir)regularity, and other phonotactic criteria. In this section, we also refer briefly to the traditional opposition between productivity and creativity and discuss its appropriateness. Finally, section 4 addresses the issue of how productivity has (in)directly changed the way research in morphology is carried out – in particular, how corpus-based, empirical approaches, together with a renewed attention to hapaxes, are nowadays producing a shift towards uncontrolled, real-data-driven reasoning in morphology.

Mots clés: morphology; productivity; corpus-based morphology

Domaines: Linguistique

Georgette Dal, Fiammetta Namer. Productivity. Andrew Hippisley & Gregory T. Stump. The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, Cambridge University Press., pp.70-90, 2016. ⟨hal-01303313⟩