GDC Lahor(SWABI)

Name USAMA HUBAIB

Roll No 151
Semester 5th
Department English
Subject Morphology and syntax
Assignment topic Morphological Productivity
Discipline English
Submitted to Ijaz sir
Institution G.D.C lahor
 Morphological Productivity

Introduction

Morphological productivity is a widely discussed topic in English word formation. What it means for
a word formation process to be morphologically productive is controversial and various views exist
concerning the definition of morphological productivity. The present essay aims to shed some light
on the matter. A number of definitions of morphological productivity will be presented and
discussed and especially the difference between productivity and creativity, and if there is such a
difference at all, will be highlighted. Moreover, the question of whether productivity can be
measured will be addressed, and different types of productivity measure will be compared and
discussed. Is there such a thing as a good productivity measure, and how can the presented methods
be improved? Rather than giving a superficial overview of many aspects of morphological
productivity, this essay will focus on only a few, but nevertheless very important viewpoints.

What is morphological productivity?

Linguists point of view

The question of what morphological productivity is cannot be answered explicitly as there exist many
different viewpoints in the literature. While

 Bauer (1983) states that a word-formation process is productive “if it can be used
synchronically in the production of new forms”.
 Plag (1999) argues that productivity is “the property of an affix to be used to coin new
complex words”.

Now, according to Plag productivity only accounts for inflectional and derivational processes, but
Bauer does not share this opinion. In fact, he points out that “there are some word-formation
processes which are non-affixal, but which may nevertheless be productive” (Bauer 2001:12)

There are several other definitions of morphological productivity, like that of

 Spencer (1991) who regards a rule as productive if it is “regularly and actively used in the
creation of totally new words” (49).

Spencer’s definition resembles that of Bauer in that he focuses on the synchronic creation of new
words, but also differs in the respect that Bauer highlights the potential formation of new words
while Spencer points out that productivity is an active process. Therefore, according to Spencer,
morphological productivity is not concerned with the possibility of a word-formation process to form
new words but there has to be actual evidence for this. So

Def

 Morphologically Productivity is defined as ‘the possibility of creating a new word’.

 The property of an affix to be used to coin new complex words is referred to as the
productivity of that affix.

A word-formation rule or affix is considered productive if it has the ability to coin new words by
other word-formation processes.

There are two key issues concerning the confusion of the term productivity and would considered
them worth explaining at the very outset of the discussion.

 Productivity is not a matter of yes or no, rather it is an issue of more or less.

 Second important clarification is that ‘Productivity’ is a matter of synchronic study of feature.
 Kinds of Morphological Processes

We shall review a few ways in which two morphs can be composed. The general term for
grammatical morphs is affix. Generally, an affix to a string ~x is a string ~y that puts itself somewhere
in ~x. Given the terminology below, it is either a prefix, a suffix or an infix. Some writers use it in a
more general sense, but we shall not do that. Morphs are not always affixes, however. A morph need
not be a piece (= string) that we add somewhere; it may be several pieces (transfix, circumfix), or
simply a certain kind of change effected on the string in question (like vowel change). The general
term for all of these is morphological change. We shall give a few examples of what kinds of
morphological changes there are in the languages of the world.

Suffixes and Prefixes

A suffix is a string that is added at the end, a prefix is a string that is added at the beginning. English
has mostly suffixes (derivational ones like /ation/, /ize/, /ee/; inflectional ones like /s/ and /d/). But it
also has prefixes: /de/, /re/, /un/ are prefixes. It is generally agreed that—if we use an analogy with
syntax here—the affix is the head, and that it either expects the string on its right (prefix) or on its
left (suffix). If there were only suffixes and prefixes, morphology would look like syntax.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Morphemes can be of different types, and can come in different shapes. Some morphemes
are affixes: they can’t stand on their own, and have to attach to something. The morphemes -
s (in cats) and inter– and -al (in international) are all affixes.

The thing an affix attaches to is called a base. Just like whole words, some bases are morphologically
simple, while others are morphologically complex.

For example, consider the word librarian. This word is formed by attaching the affix -ian to the
base library.

We can ignore the fact that ‘y’ turns into an ‘i’ when a suffix attaches to library. There’s a convention
of English spelling that ‘y’ becomes ‘i’ before an affix; it doesn’t reflect any change in phonological
shape.

Librarian can then itself be the base for another affix: for example, the word librarianship, the state or
role of being a librarian, is formed by attaching the affix -ship to the base librarian.

There is a special name for simple bases: root. A root is the smallest possible base, which cannot be
divided, what we might think of as the core of a word. Roots in English we’ve seen so far in this
chapter include cat, library, and nation.
Infix

Infixes are affixes that appear in the middle of another morpheme. For example, in Tagalog (a
language with about 24 million speakers, most of them in the Philippines) the infix -um- appears
immediately after the first consonant of the base to which it attaches. This infix expresses perfective
aspect for verbs. Perfective aspect indicates completed action, usually translated with the English
simple past:

 [takbuh] run [tumakbuh] ran

 [kain] eat [kumain] ate

For an affix to be an infix, it must appear inside another another morpheme, not just in the middle of
a word. If you look at the word unluckiness (un-luck-y-ness), for example, -y is a suffix that just
happens to appear in the middle of the word because another suffix (-ness) attaches after it. But -
y still isn’t an infix, because it attaches after its base (luck), not inside its base.

 A prefix is an affix that attaches before its base, like inter- in international.

 A suffix is an affix that follows its base, like -s in cats.
 A circumfix is an affix that attaches around its base.
 An infix is an affix that attaches inside its base.
 A simultaneous affix is an affix that takes place at the same time as its base.
 Prefixes and suffixes are very common, not only in English but also in other languages.
Circumfixes, infixes, and simultaneous affixes are less common, and so we’ll look at examples
of each in order.

Circumfixes

A circumfix consists of a part that is being added before the word and another that is added
thereafter. It is thus a combination of prefix and suffix.

” A circumfix consists of a prefix and a suffix that together produce a derived or inflected form, as in
the English word enlighten.

Transfixes

A transfix is an even more complex entity. We give an example from Egyptian Arabic. Roots have
three consonants, for example /ktb/ ‘to write’ and /drs/ ‘to study’. Words are formed by adding some
material in front (prefixation), some material after (suffixation) and some material in between
(infixation). Moreover, all these typically happen at the same time. Let’s look at the following list.

 [katab] ‘he wrote’ [daras] ‘he studied’

 [Pamal] ‘he did’ [na\al] ‘he copied’
It requires some patience to find out how the different words have been formed. There are variations
in the patterns (just like in any other language). One thing however is already apparent: the vowels
get changed from one form to the other. This explains why the vowel is not thought of as being part
of the root.

Measuring productivity

 To measure the productivity of an affix, a number of productivity measures have been

proposed.
 There is one quantitative measure that is probably the most widely used and the most widely
rejected at the same time.
 According to this measure, the productivity of an affix can be discerned by counting the
number of attested different words with that affix at a given point in time. This has also been
called the type-frequency of an affix.
 The severe problem with this measure is that there can be many words with a given affix, but
nevertheless speakers will not use the suffix to make up new words.

An example of such a suffix is -ment, which in earlier centuries led to the coinage of hundreds of
then new words. Many of these are still in use, but today’s speakers hardly ever employ - ment to
create a new word.