Morphological Productivity Measurement: Exploring Qualitative versus Quantitative Approaches
Jesús Fernández-Domínguez · English Studies · 2013
Morphological productivity was originally described as the property of word-formation processes whereby new words are created to satisfy a naming need, a definition later enhanced with Corbin's classical distinction between availability and profitability. Despite the importance of these two concepts, they have been traditionally overlooked in the design and discussion of productivity computations. Moreover, no thorough exploration has been made of the implications they have in existing models of productivity measurement. This paper examines the treatment given to this notional pair in the mainstream productivity methods by, first, examining their theoretical background and, second, discussing their practical implications in their application to a BNC-derived corpus. Subsequently, a number of suggestions are provided, and an alternative unifying method is proposed which is able to provide insights into both availability and profitability in the computations of morphological productivity of word-formation processes.