Parsing and productivity

Abstract

It has often been argued that the (type or token) frequency of an affix in the lexicon cannot be used to predict the degree to which that affix is productive. Affix type frequency refers to the number of different words which contain an affix, token frequency refers to the summed lexical frequency of those words. The observation that neither of these counts relates straightforwardly to productivity, raises difficult questions about the source of different degrees of productivity, making the nature of morphological productivity one of the “central mysteries of word-formation” (Aronoff 1976:35). If productivity does not arise as a function of frequency, then where does it come from?