Harald Baayen

Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity

Research into the phenomenon of morphological productivity, “the possibility for language users to coin, unintentionally, a number of formations which are in principle uncountable” (Schultink 1961), has mainly focused on the qualitative factors which jointly determine the productivity of word formation rules. It is well known that word formation processes are subject to various syntagmatic conditions. Booij (1977) develops a typology of such conditioning factors, distinguishing between rule-specific and rule-independent restrictions on the one hand, and between restrictions pertaining to phonological, stratal and syntactic characteristics on the other.1 The role of pardigmatic factors is discussed in van Marie (1985). He points out that (roughly) synonymous affixes tend to select their base words from complementary domains. Hence they can be analyzed as mutually affecting their respective degrees of productivity.

Productivity and English derivation: a corpus-based study

The notion of productivity is one which is central to the study of morphology. It is a notion about which linguists frequently have intuitions. But it is a notion which still remains somewhat problematic in the literature on generative morphology some 15 years after Aronoff raised the issue in his (1976) monograph. In this paper we will review some of the definitions and measures of productivity discussed in the generative and pregenerative literature. We will adopt the definition of productivity suggested by Schultink (1961) and propose a number of statistical measures of productivity whose results, when applied to a fixed corpus, accord nicely with our intuitive estimates of productivity, and which shed light on the quantitative weight of linguistic restrictions on word-formation rules. Part of our purpose here is also a very simple one: to make available a substantial set of empirical data concerning the productivity of some of the major derivational affixes of English. In this paper we propose a measure of productivity in morphology which is based on the definition of productivity in Schultink (1961). We argue that a measure of productivity based on the token frequencies of types, specifically on the number of hapax legomena for a given affix in a corpus, comes very close to according with our intuitions about productivity. We illustrate this result by applying our measure to a substantial body of empirical data from English derivational morphology. Our aim is not merely to develop a quantitative measure and to see how it accords with the data, but also to provide a measure of productivity that would be of use in morphological theory. Specifically, having such a measure of productivity would be of use in delimiting the set of data which a theory of word formation should be accountable to. Presumably, morphological theory should account only for processes of word formation which are Linguistics 29 (1991), 801-843 0024-3949/91/0029-0801

On frequency, transparency and productivity

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Parsing and productivity

Morphological productivity arises through a complex interaction between language structure, processing complexity and social convention. In Baayen (1989, 1991) I developed two complementary methods for the quantitative evaluation of this phenomenon. The first, and computationally most convenient method is to assess what Baayen and Lieber (1991) call the global productivity of a word formation process in terms of the number of different types V and the probability of encountering new types, P = n 1/N, where n 1 denotes the number of types with the required affix that occur only once (the so-called hapax legomena) and N the total number of tokens with this affix in some corpus. The number of types V was interpreted as a measure of the extent of use, P as a measure of the degree of productivity. Baayen and Lieber (1991) applied this method in detail to a representative sample of English derivational processes. They observed that the quantitative results obtained accorded reasonably well with intuitive judgements of productivity. The second, equally valid but computationally more costly method for evaluating morphological productivity proceeds in terms of estimates of the numbers of possible types S calculated on the basis of the frequency spectra of morphological categories.

Effects of semantic markedness in the processing of regular nominal singulars and plurals in Italian

It has often been argued that the (type or token) frequency of an affix in the lexicon cannot be used to predict the degree to which that affix is productive. Affix type frequency refers to the number of different words which contain an affix, token frequency refers to the summed lexical frequency of those words. The observation that neither of these counts relates straightforwardly to productivity, raises difficult questions about the source of different degrees of productivity, making the nature of morphological productivity one of the “central mysteries of word-formation” (Aronoff 1976:35). If productivity does not arise as a function of frequency, then where does it come from?

Dutch Inflection: The Rules that Prove the Exception

Are fully regular complex words stored as wholes in the lexicon in a language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology such as Italian? Surprisingly, in certain circumstances the answer appears to be yes. In this paper, we will introduce empirical evidence for the storage of locally unmarked plurals in Italian in visual word recognition and analyze this evidence in a mathematical model of lexical processing developed in Schreuder and Baayen (1996) and Baayen, Dijkstra and Schreuder (1995). We will argue that, unlike in traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic models of the lexicon, morphological rules and storage of complex words are not mutually incompatible. We will show that their combined availability speeds up lexical processing.

Morphological productivity across speech and writing

This chapter addresses the balance of storage and computation in the mental lexicon for fully regular and productive inflectional processes in Dutch. We present evidence that both regular inflected nouns and regular inflected verbs show clear and robust effects of storage, but that at the same time on-line parsing also plays a role. We argue that the balance of storage and computation cannot be predicted on the basis of economy of linguistic description. Instead, a range of cognitive and linguistic factors are crucial determinants.

Verbal prefixes in Dutch: a study in lexical conceptual structure

Claims about the productivity of a given affix are generally made without differentiating productivity according to type of discourse, although it is commonly assumed that certain kinds of derivational suffixes are more pertinent in certain kinds of texts than in others. Conversely, studies in register variation have paid very little attention to the role derivational morphology may play in register variation. This paper explores the relation between register variation and derivational morphology through a quantitative investigation of the productivity of a number of English derivational suffixes across three types of discourse in the British National Corpus (written language, context-governed spoken language, and everyday conversations). Three main points emerge from the analysis. First, within a single register, different suffixes may differ enormously in their productivity, even if structurally they are constrained to a similar extent. Second, across the three registers under investigation a given suffix may display vast differences in productivity. Third, the register variation of suffixes is not uniform, i.e. there are suffixes that show differences in productivity across registers while other suffixes do not, or do so to a lesser extent. We offer some tentative explanations for these findings and discuss the implications for morphological theory.

Nominalizations in a calculus of lexical semantic representations

The subject of our study is verbal prefixation in Dutch; specifically we will be concerned with the prefixes ver-, be- and ont- illustrated in (1)–(3):

Morphology: why, how, when, when not, and why not?

The history of generative grammar has been such that exploration of the structure and meanings of words has long stayed on the back burner. With respect to the structure of words, this picture began to change in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with the appearance of the first substantial works on the structure of word formation within the theory (e.g., Aronoff 1976; Lieber 1980; Williams 1981; Selkirk 1982). Following this there was a gradual increase in interest in the area of morphology that has led to a virtual explosion in recent years. A somewhat less direct trajectory has been followed in the history of lexical semantics within generative grammar. After an initial burst of activity as part of the Generative Semantics/Interpretive Semantics debate of the late 1960’s, interest in general issues of lexical semantics flagged within the generative tradition, with the notable exception of the lines of work pursued by Bierwisch (1989, 1997) or Jackendoff (1983, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1996).1