SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2003 - 026 Morphological productivity

Morphological productivity is one of the most contested areas in the study of word formation. In this research volume Bauer reviews the significant contributions of scholars to the subject over the past 20–30 years. (As a caveat, amongst the 300 or so references to those who have made a contribution only one was to an SIL scholar, and that was Pike 1967). His chapters range over all the key areas of the subject, such as a definition of the notion of morphological productivity, type and token frequency, transparency and opacity of morphological categories, regular and irregular forms, markedness and naturalness, default versus majority morphological processes, rulegoverned versus analogy-governed word formation, binary versus scalar productivity, and the psycholinguistic evidence about productivity. In each case he assesses the research and arguments of different scholars (often conflicting) and attempts to reach a conclusion of which argument is the strongest. For example, on the debate as to whether word forms or morphemes are the basic unit of the mental lexicon, Bauer decides that psycholinguistic evidence in favour of a distinct treatment of regular and irregular forms is conclusive evidence against the amorphous model of Anderson (1992).