Narrow Productivity, Competition, and Blocking in Word Formation

Junya Morita


Abstract
The present study explores the productivity of word formation processes in English, focusing on word composition by suffixes such as ​-ize (e.g. transcendentalize​), ​-(a)(t)ion (​territorization)​ , and ​-al (​realizational​). An optimal productivity measure for affixation is identified, which makes best use of hapax legomena in a large-scale corpus and attaches great importance to the base forms of an affix. This measure is then applied to the data collected from a large corpus to compute the productivity values of twelve kinds of affixes. The detailed investigation reveals that (i) the high productivity rate of an affix demonstrates a creative aspect of the affix, giving full support to the idea of “generative” morphology, (ii) productivity is gradient; very high, fairly high, and low productivity of affixes are recognizable, and (iii) this is necessarily reflected in determining the word form of a derivative (cf. ​territoriz​ation​); competition is carried out to decide which affix is selected for a given base form (​territorize​) and the “losers” (​-ment/-al​) are blocked out.
Anthology ID:
2018.clib-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB 2018)
Month:
May
Year:
2018
Address:
Sofia, Bulgaria
Venue:
CLIB
SIG:
Publisher:
Department of Computational Linguistics, Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Note:
Pages:
34–40
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.clib-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junya Morita. 2018. Narrow Productivity, Competition, and Blocking in Word Formation. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB 2018), pages 34–40, Sofia, Bulgaria. Department of Computational Linguistics, Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Cite (Informal):
Narrow Productivity, Competition, and Blocking in Word Formation (Morita, CLIB 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.clib-1.6.pdf