Degrees of grammatical productivity in inflectional morphology: 1119

Abstract

This paper focusses on grammatical productivity as constitutive property of a model of dynamic morphology (in contrast to overlapping static morphology, which is unproductive). Grammatical productivity is located in the potential system of grammar (here exemplified with inflectional morphology) as opposed to type frequency belonging to the level of language as social institution and to token frequency belonging to the level of performance. Productivity is prototypical for morphological categories, rules and paradigm classes formed by them. This contribution concentrates on productive microclasses. Section 3 establishes degrees of grammatical productivity according to effects in integration of loan words, of extragrammatical neologisms, conversion and class shifts. Theoretical consequences for the model of Natural Morphology espoused here (section 4) concern the function of productivity, the distinction between morphological richness and complexity and competition between productive rules. In order to vouch for psychological reality of the model, psycholinguistic consequences are shown, in the framework of a race model, for online processing, first language acquisition and offline evaluation tests (section 5).