Frequency and productivity in Italian derivation: A comparison between corpus-based and lexicographical data

Abstract

Although frequency is claimed to be a relevant parameter in order to evaluate the productivity and the availability of word formation processes, regrettably few studies primarily deal with it. Italian is no exception in this respect. In this paper, frequency data (both in tokens and types) are provided concerning 58 Italian derivational affixes totalling around 5,000,000 tokens and 30,000 types in a 75,000,000-tokens newspaper corpus. Moreover, two different kinds of hapax-based quantitative evaluations of productivity are applied to the corpus data. Type frequencies and productivities are then compared to those obtainable from lexicographical sources. On the whole, dictionary-based evaluations turn out to be much less reliable descriptors of the affix behaviour with respect to the corpus-based measurements.