INGO PLAGS WORD FORMATION

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INGO PLAGS WORD - FORMATION

• Productivity and the mental lexicon

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productivity

• is the property of an affix to be used to coin
  new complex words
• affixes posses different degress of productivity
  more or less productive

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possible/ potential word

• a word whose semantic, morphological or
  phonological structure is in accordance with the
  rules and regularities of the language
• the state of a word as a possible word is
  uncontroversial
• predictability of meaning their meaning is
  predictable on the basis of the
• word-formation- rule according to which they have
  been formed

actual/ existing word

• a word that has already been coined or used by
  speakers of a language

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mental lexicon

• the words one knows
• mental lexicons of different speakers of a
  language are not identical
• knowledge of a word is a gradual notion
• knowing a word vs. a word listed in the mental
  lexicon

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actual/ existing word

• a word that is found in a text or in conversation
  and that is known by other speakers of the
  language
• contains of morphological simple and complex
  words
• some of them behave according to word-formation
  rules
• some words are idiosyncratic
• crucial difference between actual and possible
  words
• - only actual words can be idiosyncratic
• - possible words are never idiosyncratic

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mental lexicon

• like a prison it contains only the lawless
• almost similar to a regular dictionaries
• But the human brain does not follow the
  organizational principles established by
  dictionary makers.
• complex and simplex, regular and idiosyncratic
  words can be listed
• Why exclude complex words?
• - economy of storage
• - minimal redundant
• But the human brain doesnt avoid redundancy and
  the way words are stored is not totally
  economical because the human brain must be able
  to store and process words.
• Speakers and hearers of a language must be able
  to access and retrieve words from the mental
  lexicon within fragments of seconds.
• ? conflict between necessity of quick access and
  the necessity of economical storage

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wholeword route

• direct access to the whole-word representation
• word is stored as a whole in the mental lexicon
• ? costly in terms of storage
• ? clear advantage in processing

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decomposition route

• access to the decomposed elements
• word is decomposed in its parts and the parts are
  being looked up individually
• ? clear advantage in storage/ extremely
  economical
• ? involves high processing costs
• There are evidences for both kinds of storage and
  so each incoming word is processed in parallel on
  both routes.
• The faster route wins the race and the item is
  retrieved in that way.

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frequency

• more frequent words are stored and accessed more
  easily in the mental lexicon than less frequent
  words

resting activity

• is the remaining activity of a word after it has
  been retrieved
• extremely frequent complex words
• gt higher resting activation
• gt whole-word route wins
• low-frequency complex words
• gt lower resting activation
• gt decomposition route wins
• ? so the frequency of occurrence plays an
  important role in the storage and retrieval of
  complex and simplex words

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corpora/ corpus

• large electronical collection of spoken and
  written texts
• they have a frequency list, which states how
  often a word occurs
• e.g. British National Corpus
• types number of different words in a corpus
• tokens overall number of words in a corpus

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There are four measures to classify the
productivity of an affix on a scale between
completely unproductive and fully productive
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counting the different words with that affix at a
given point in time
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2
counting only those derivates that were newly
coined in a given period (neologisms)
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3
representative sample of text like a corpus
extent of use method counting the number of
types with a given affix
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4
count the token frequency
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the four presented measures each highlight a
different aspect of productivity
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reversal of actions

• unmarry or the creation of the word etherize
  that names the action of applying ether to
  patients

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syntactic recategorization

• Faye usually works in a different department.
  She is such a good worker that every department
  wants to have her on their staff

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expression of an attitude

• hey, cutiepie, good to see you!

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Pragmatic restrictions

• extra-linguistic developments because of fashion
  
• super, mega, giga, mini

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Structural restrictions

• phonological properties
• - al arrive arrival
• betray betrayal
• - en black blacken
• fat fatten
• wide - widen

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Structural restrictions

• morphological properties
• colonization vs colonizement, colonizal
  and colonizage

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Structural restrictions

• semantic restriction
• squeezee
• 1. Id discovered that if I hugged the right side
  of the road, drivers would be more reluctant to
  move their left thereby creating a squeeze play
  with me being the squeezee
• VS
• 2. After making himself a glace of grapefruit
  juice, John threw the squeezees away.

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Structural restrictions

• syntactic properties
• suffix able
• suffix al

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Blocking

• thief / stealer
• liver / liver