Measurement of productivity in English

Abstract EN

In English, the formation of preterite and past participle forms of verbs by means of ablaut (for example, sing–sang–sung) is no longer considered productive.

Newly coined verbs in English overwhelmingly use the 'weak' (regular) ending -ed for the past tense and past participle (for example, spammed, e-mailed).

Similarly, the only clearly productive plural ending is -(e)s; it is found on the vast majority of English count nouns and is used to form the plurals of neologisms, such as FAQs and Muggles.

The ending -en, on the other hand, is no longer productive, found only in oxen, children, and the now-rare brethren.

Because these old forms can sound incorrect to modern ears, regularization can wear away at them until they are no longer used: brethren has now been replaced with the more regular-sounding brothers except when talking about religious orders.

The significance of productivity in practice and theory, for many, is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process for the formation of novel structures.

A productive grammatical process defines an open class, one that admits new words or forms.

Non-productive grammatical processes may be seen as operative within closed classes: they remain within the language and may include very common words, but are not added to and may be lost in time or through regularization converting them into what now seems to be a correct form.

This research is about ‘productivity of word – formation.’ It is divided into three sections.

The first section is a general introduction about the meaning of productivity and its relation with other terms.

The second one is about some constraints in forming words.

The last section is concerning the ways one can measure the morphological rules.

There are four ways to measure the productivity of word–formation: the number of actual word, the number of possible words, the ratio of actual words to possible words, and the number of neologisms attested over a certain period.