LEXICAL PRODUCTIVITY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE A THEORETICAL APPROACH

Abstract

The morphological productivity represents a central theme in the study of words' formation. After a brief passage through the various definitions and theories given by top leading linguists, which can pave the way towards achieving the proposed research, as being an enough sinuous path, - I would say. This theme, after being overshadowed a long period of time, drew, nowadays, many authors' attention, having a fruitful result, taking into account the apparition of major research studies on this topic: Baayen (1992, 1994, 2003), Bauer (2001, 2005), Plag (1999, 2003, 2006), Stekauer (1998, 2001, 2005), Schultink (1992),etc. A major contribution to the theory of word formation and an undeniable influence on this subject had Hans Marchand, proponent of "Tübingen Schule"1, who was heavily influenced by the American structuralism. His work The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation from 1960, is considered a guide mark in the field of the derivational morphology.

Headnote

Abstract: The morphological productivity represents a central theme in the study of words' formation. After a brief passage through the various definitions and theories given by top leading linguists, which can pave the way towards achieving the proposed research, as being an enough sinuous path, - I would say.

This theme, after being overshadowed a long period of time, drew, nowadays, many authors' attention, having a fruitful result, taking into account the apparition of major research studies on this topic: Baayen (1992, 1994, 2003), Bauer (2001, 2005), Plag (1999, 2003, 2006), Stekauer (1998, 2001, 2005), Schultink (1992),etc.

A major contribution to the theory of word formation and an undeniable influence on this subject had Hans Marchand, proponent of "Tübingen Schule"1, who was heavily influenced by the American structuralism. His work The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation from 1960, is considered a guide mark in the field of the derivational morphology.

Keywords: productivity, lexical creativity, morphology, afixation, lexical innovation.

"Productivity is one of the central

mysteries of derivational morphology"

Mark Aronoff

We can distinguish at least seven definitions of productivity in the specific literature, these definitions are conditioned by: the frequency of the produced word, the number of the available databases, the proportion of the words used in reality, in comparison with the number of words potentially created as a result of a particular process, the possibility of new words' formation, the probability of new words' formation and the number of new words which appear in a given period of time.

Taking into account the different points of view, we could say that the two terms, creativity and productivity can be considered as hyponyms of the word innovation. Productivity is a morphological process governed by rules, while creativity is not subject to this government.

If we read the specific literature concerning the English language, with the problems of the vocabulary's enrichment, we find that the linguistic phenomenon - which represents, under various manifestations, the language's and speakers' ability and opportunity to create a new word, has this interesting name : productivity.

Productivity in English, with a wide range of different words which explains, enhances or varies the expression of the same meaning: innovation, change, modification, transformation, translation of meaning, new combinations, enrichment and degradation of meaning, semantic mutations, semantic evolutions, dynamics of the meaning, etc..

It is needless the opening of the dictionary in order to find that "productivity" and "creativity" are synonymous, since they are similarly defined. But let's see which these definitions are, as they were given by top leading linguists, definitions which reflect different opinions, but which are based on the same concept, that one of language's creation :

- "Productivity is defined as the possibility of creating new words based on existing words or word-forming elements"2.

- "the statistical readiness with which an element enters into new combinations"3,

- "The Possibility for language users to coin, unintentionally, a number of formations that is, in principle, enumerably infinite." (Schultink 1961)4;

- "Speakers' ability to create infinitely Many new combinations out of the finite linguistic they have resources at their disposal"5.

John Lyons - a British linguist - states that "all living languages (...) are, by their nature sustainable and sufficient communication systems, carrying into practice the various and multiple social needs belonging to the communities which use them. As these needs change, languages will tend to evolve in order to get through the new conditions. If it needs new terms, they will be placed in vocabulary, by means of borrowing them from other languages, either by creating them from the existing items into the vocabulary through the internal means of language"6.

I think that is very important and Eugene Coseriu's theory perceives the language as energeia, concept introduced by Aristotle, quoted by Humboldt. For Humboldt, "energeia" means creative activity and Coseriu proposed the language to be perceived as a creative activity in all its forms7.

Concerning the creativity, Eugen Coseriu perceives a difference between Humboldt and Chomsky, namely, the sense of creativity in Humboldt differs from that of Chomsky. "The Humboldt's is not producing sentences through language, but about the language's production itself."8

Known for his "Theory of Generative Grammar" and for his contributions to theoretical linguistics, Chomsky is the one who has revolutionized the entire modern linguistics' system through his famous generative models. He is one who has made a clear distinction between linguistics' competence and linguistics' performance.

"Chomsky was and remains concerned about the way in which, in any language, speakers may find infinite uses of scarce resources"9.

Humboldt, Chomsky's precursor, used the concepts of "energeia" and "internal form", in analogy with the "creativity" and "the deep structure" which we can fiind to Chomsky, too.

Starting from "energeia", Humboldt put creativity under the light of new rules and not under the light of déjà used existing rules.

Returning to Coseriu, we can say that even no linguistics can not produce an unlimited number of facts of language, starting from a system of rules, but this production may cause and create new production rules. The language is not an inert product, but it is something to become. There is not a tool, but "energeia", a cretive activity.10

We meet, to Theodor Hristea almost the same definition given by Plag: "Considering that word formation is a section of lexicology (in the broadest sense), we claim that it leads to the creation of new lexical units that already exist in a given language"11.

"In the Romanian linguistics, the word formation is one of the most important chapters of a language, because it may be seen there the mechanism of lexical creation itself or how a language works in order to create, for itself, new items which are endowed with new meanings."12

So, we feel the need to clarify, in some extention the difference between cretivity and productivity, a fine difference which may be discerned by taking into account, over time, the views of linguists.

We could start with the question: is it necessary to make a distinction between "productivity" and "creativity" in the morphology's field and in what way? If productivity is not a function of repetition, frequency or semantic coherence, then which kind of factors influence it?

Bauer concludes that there is not, yet, a clear method, an unambiguous one in order to determine the productivity of a morphological process.

He also gives the following definition for productivity: "Productivity of a morphological process is its potential for repetitive non-creative morphological coining".

The subtlety of this definition is suggested by the fact that productivity is seen as an ambiguous phenomenon that is placed between availability and profitability.

This important distinction is taken from Corbin, who made a limitation of processes between "available" (reserved/disponible, in French) and "profitable" (advantageous/rentable in French)13.

A process is available, available in a given area, if the grammar allows the formation of new words through that process, in the synchronic plan .

It is a property is "all-or-nothing". For example, a verb ended in -ise may be nominated by the suffix -ation, but not with the suffix -ment, so it is allowed V-ise suffixation +-ation, and not +-ment. We may find that a process is profitable when it allows the formation of new words, training which can be affected by linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints.

CONCLUSION

1. The disponibility is the potential of a morphological process to create new words, repeatedly, under certain rules;

2. Profitability reflects the extent to which the availability of a morphological process is exploited in the use of the language.

An interesting and objective aspect, underlined by Bauer, is the role of using corpus as very valuable tool in the study of productivity in the current language. Corpus gives us a realistic picture of the language, as shown by way of speaking and writing. But an analyzed corpus has the same inherent weakness: it can not cover everything that happens and is new in the use of language, in speech, even in a selected field. We have just samples, but not catalogues or complex dictionaries in order to enumerate everything that happens in a language. There are still more explicit dictionaries, for example Oxford English Dictionary which contains information on when a particular shape began to be productive.

The structure of the individual language can also play a role in what counts as natural for that language. In the case of English derivation, we can see that classchanging morphology is overwhelmingly suffixal.

The infinite number of possible formations is determined by the fact that the class of bases is in principle open, and so cannot be pre- determined; in practice the number of possible formations may be relatively constrained and the number of actual formations very small (consider, for example, derivatives with the prefix step- such as step-mother, step-son, steprelationship).

What perhaps stands out most clearly in all of this is the way in which morphological productivity is being taken more seriously as a part of linguistic theorizing than it used to be. Productivity may be an epiphenomenon of something more basic, it may be two separate phenomena, availability and profitability, it may be a matter of grammar or it may not, but it is no longer being ignored.

Lexical word-formation processes do not appear to be as 'regular' (a term we need to take care in interpreting) as, say, syntactic processes are. Thus lack of productivity in morphology is equated to lexical word- formation, productivity to inflectional morphology.

Footnote

1 The Catholic School from the German town Tübingen.

2 Ingo Plag, Word-Formation in English

3 D. L. Bolinger On Defining the Morpheme.Word, 1948, p.18.

4 Henk Schultink, Produktiviteit als morfologisch fenomeen in Forum der Letteren, 1961, p. 110

5 Robins, R. H., A Short History of Linguistics, 1967, p.192.

6 Lyons 1995: 57

7 Cos eriu, Eugen - Sprache. Structuren und Funktionen XII. Aufsatze zur allgemeinen und romanischen Sprachwissenschaft. Structures and functionsi. XII. Essays on general linguistics and roman linguistic, Second Edition, Gunter Narr Publishing House, Tubingen, 1971, p.112

8 Cos eriu, Eugen, p.135.

9 Robins, R. H., op.cit., p.311.

10 Coseriu, Eugen, Lingustic competence: Principles of speaking teory, Franke Publishing House, Tubingen, 1988, p.11.

11 Hristea, Theodor, Romanian Language Syntheses, Didactic and Pedagogic Publishing House, Bucharest, 1981

12 Rosetti, Al., ILR 2, p.237.

13 Corbin, D., Morphologie derivationnelle et structuration du lexique, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 1987.

References

REFERENCES

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Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

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