Measuring Morphological Productivity
Olga Pustylnikov, Karina Schneider-Wiejowski · PUB – Publications at Bielefeld University (Bielefeld University) · 2009
The present article addresses the phenomenon of productivity in derivational morphology from the point of view of its quantification.Research in morphological productivity was mainly done for the English language, and there is still a lack for German, although, it is a very interesting subject.We evaluate three quantitative approaches proposed in the literature to measure productivity of German noun suffixes.In addition, we apply a decomposition algorithm used in a multi-agent simulation (Pustylnikov, 2009) to identify productive suffixes.We compare three different types of corpora in German: two newspaper corpora from different periods of time, and one corpus of spontaneous speech.Empirical studies exploring productivity mostly focus on written data, although new word formations are expected to occur to a larger extent in spoken language.In this article, we investigate the differences in results based on spoken and written corpora.