THE LEXICALIST APPROACH TO WOR
FORMATION
4.2.3 Productivity
n Aronoff’s view, only productive processes build the possible complex words
f a language: they may not still exist, but nevertheless conform to the
orphological rules of that language. Morphological processes can be classified
accordin
to their productivit
: while some
FRs are totall
productive, e.
. the
f
rmati
n
f a
r
ith -l
[[ ]
+ -l
A
which can be said to appl
to most
En
lish ad
ectives), others exhibit a lower productivit
(e.
. -
, which onl
ccasionally forms new words
r
gangsterdom
girldom
ronoff gives two different views on the issue of productivity: First, he proposes
and quickly dismisses) a method to calculate the productivity of a given WFR as
the ratio of possible input entries and attested output entries. Second, he points out
that productivity “goes hand in hand” with semantic compositionality: any complex
word whose properties are completely predictable from the interaction of the
Lexicon and the set of WFRs is a
ossible word that does not need to be listed
whether it has been attested or not
and the related WFR is a
roductive one.
nstead, if a word has some idios
ncratic feature (formal, semantic, s
ntactic), it
must be stipulated and not constructed by
rule. (For a detailed account of these and
any other issues related to morphological productivity, cf. Bauer 2001 and this
olume
.
.
.4 Restrictions on
FRs
One of the goals of syntactic theory is the definition of the class of possible
entences of a language. Similarly, one of the goals of morphological theory is the
definition of the class of possible words of a language. To achieve this goal, Aronoff
provides WFRs with a series of restrictions in order to determine correctl
(a) the
ind of information that is available to them, and (b) the kind of operations that the
an carry out (cf. Rainer, this volume, for a thorough and critical assessment of the
theoretical status of restrictions on WFRs
.
onsider the following schema:
13
Y
X
u
h
of a WFR (in this case a rule adding a suffix) is the set of all words that
an
tit
t
th
symbol dominated by X. X’s lexical category might not by itself
be sufficient to establish appropriately the base of a suffix. In order to exclude all the
words yielding ungrammatical X+Suf combinations from the base, restrictions must
be formulated re
ardin
different t
pes of information: there exist s
ntactic,
emantic, phonolo
ical and morpholo
ical restrictions on the base of a WFR.