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Morphological Productivity and The Mental Lexicon

The document discusses morphological productivity and how words are stored in the mental lexicon. It describes two views of productivity - as gradient or discrete. An affix is considered highly productive if it occurs with many word bases to form new words, allows hapax legomena, and has few restrictions on new formations based on pragmatic, phonological, lexical, or semantic constraints. The mental lexicon stores information about a word's sound, meaning, and morphological and syntactic combinations, and allows people to reconstruct meanings of new words by decomposing affixes and bases, though this retrieval is slower than accessing whole word forms. A dual-route model suggests people use both whole word retrieval and decomposition depending on a word's frequency.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
173 views2 pages

Morphological Productivity and The Mental Lexicon

The document discusses morphological productivity and how words are stored in the mental lexicon. It describes two views of productivity - as gradient or discrete. An affix is considered highly productive if it occurs with many word bases to form new words, allows hapax legomena, and has few restrictions on new formations based on pragmatic, phonological, lexical, or semantic constraints. The mental lexicon stores information about a word's sound, meaning, and morphological and syntactic combinations, and allows people to reconstruct meanings of new words by decomposing affixes and bases, though this retrieval is slower than accessing whole word forms. A dual-route model suggests people use both whole word retrieval and decomposition depending on a word's frequency.
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Morphological productivity and the mental lexicon

The productivity of a word formation process is the degree of cognitive ease with which speakers
can produce or process new complex words on the basis of that process.>> Hence, there are
affixes more productive than others.

There are two general views on productivity. One states that productivity is gradient, so a given affix is
considered to be more or less productive. In other words, an affix can be highly productive or nearly
unproductive. (ver en español) The other view considers productivity as a discrete property and the
affix reflects a rule with no exceptions, a rule that applies in every case. According to this point of
view, inflectional morphemes are productive, and most derivational ones aren’t: VERB + s: walks,
runs, eats, sleeps, etc. vs un + ADJ: unhappy, unproductive, unfit, *ungreen, etc.

An affix is productive if:


-It occurs with many bases (type frequency). It can be easily used with new bases to form new words. It
has few restrictions that would prevent coinages with new bases
-If a corpus contains many hapax legomena (high ratio of forms that occur only once in a corpora
which contains large collections of text)
-If there are few restrictions on new formations (pragmatic, phonological, lexical and semantic):
Pragmatic: the formation doesn’t make sense>>> you cannot *unmurder someone; the *onliest book I
ever read ; I *disgrow broccoli on my garden.
Phonological: the affix only works with bases of a certain structural kind: arrive + al; betray + al;
deny+ al; *answer + al; * state + al>>> the affix “al” can only be attached to bisyllabic bases with final
stress. >>> buscar en español más ejemplos.
Lexical: the new formation means something for which there already is a very frequent word. This is
called blocking. * steal + er (robber); * good + est (best); * see + able ; * intelligent + ness.
Semantic: The affix only occurs with bases of a certain semantic kind: employ + ee ; interviewee;
trainee, *eatee; *peelee>>> “ee” formations has to refer to a sentient human being.

The mental lexicon contains information about a word’s sound, meaning, morphological combinatorics,
syntactic combinatorics. In order to use a word, speaker have to know its sounds and their order, its
meaning, how it combines with affixes and how it combines with other words. >>> CORRER>>>
[ko'rɛɾ]; Correr: Dicho de una persona o animal. Desplazarse rápidamente con pasos largos, de manera
que entre un paso y el siguiente los pies/patas quedan por un momento en el aire. corr + imos/+í/ía/eré,
etc. Él + corrió + torpemente + alrededor de la pequeña laguna

The mental lexicon an ordinary dictionary


Associative organization Alphabetic organization
Stores many word combinations Stores mainly single words
Stores ‘base’ forms Stores ‘base’ forms and inflected forms
Info about sounds, spelling, meaning and syntactic IDEM.
class

NOW: Do people remember all words as individual forms? Or do people economize and remember
only morphemes?
The first idea implies that for word storage a lot of memory is needed, but words can be retrieved fast
and directly.
The second idea is more economical because it needs fewer representations. You can reconstruct the
meanings of “new” words. But there is slow retrieval: some assembly processes are required:
decomposition during comprehension; composition during production.

-The dual route model: It turns out that people do both in different circumstances.
In understanding complex words, two processes are at work at the same time and compete:
-the whole word route
-the decomposition route
Each incoming complex word is processed simultaneously by these two routes. The faster one “wins
the race”.

fast
insane

insane

in- sane

slow

Complex words that are more frequent than their components are processed by the whole word route:
for example [extracted from the TIME corpus]: incomprehensible (Type frequency: 333)/
comprehensible (123)-

On the other hand, complex words that are less frequent than its components are processed by
decomposition route: illiberal (31)/ liberal (9639)

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