Morphological Productivity and The Mental Lexicon
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.
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
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)