How is Low Morphological Productivity Measured?
- Jesús Fernández-Domínguez
- Ana Díaz-Negrillo
- Pavol Štekauer
ISSN: 0210-6124
Year of publication: 2007
Volume: 29
Issue: 1
Pages: 29-54
Type: Article
More publications in: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Abstract
Morphological productivity has become a central issue in present-day English wordformation over the past decade. However, most proposals for assessing productivity have focused on the most productive processes and how to measure them, to the detriment of processes which give rise to fewer items than the ones usually studied in analyses of wordformation productivity. The present paper looks at the major models for productivity measurement and applies them to a BNC-based 5,891-item corpus to test how they account for low productivity. The results obtained highlight significant differences between various productivity counts in an area which, from this point of view, needs further methodological development