Productivit Y, Blo Cking, and Lexicaliz Ation

The topic of morphological productivity as it has been conceived in linguistics for the last half-century is treated in greatest detail in Bauer (2001). If our brief discussion here leads the reader to that book, we will have gone a long way to doing our job. In this chapter, though, we also have a different aim, which is to recast the problem of morphological productivity in a different light. Indeed, we aim to show that the term itself may sometimes be less than helpful. We believe that the most interesting and, more importantly, addressable questions in this domain have always involved not the somewhat elusive notion of productivity, but rather competition. Before getting to that point, however, we must address a more fundamental question, one whose conventional response in linguistics has impeded progress in this particular domain, although it has been enormously helpful in the investigation of other areas of language, whether linguistic systems are entirely discrete in nature.