How is Low Morphological Productivity Measured

Abstract

Morphological productivity has become a central issue in present-day English wordformation over the past decade. However, most proposals for assessing productivity have \nfocused on the most productive processes and how to measure them, to the detriment of \nprocesses which give rise to fewer items than the ones usually studied in analyses of wordformation productivity. The present paper looks at the major models for productivity \nmeasurement and applies them to a BNC-based 5,891-item corpus to test how they \naccount for low productivity. The results obtained highlight significant differences \nbetween various productivity counts in an area which, from this point of view, needs \nfurther methodological development