Words, dictionaries, and the mental lexicon

We can define a word as a sequence of one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a
language.
When the question “Is Ali and xyz really a word?” people will often look to the dictionary for
an answer. So, what is dictionary?
Which dictionary?
Dictionaries come in all shapes and sizes, for all sorts of intended audiences. The makers of
dictionaries – lexicographers – are human, but it’s still a good idea to keep in mind that neither
lexicographers nor the dictionaries they create are infallible.
The first problem with giving final authority for wordhood to the dictionary. For example; if
you look up a word in a pocket dictionary, or even a standard college desk dictionary, and it
isn’t listed, you may still have the doubt that a bigger dictionary or a more specialized
dictionary may list the word. But even if you check the largest available dictionary can you be
sure that a word that’s not listed isn’t a word? Maybe it’s too new a word to have gotten into
the dictionary yet.
Every language has ways of forming new words that putting all the words formed that way into
the dictionary would be a waste of space. For example, speakers of English know that any verb
at all can have a present progressive form made with the suffix -ing. Similarly, just about any
adjective in English can be made into a noun by adding the suffix -ness.
Dictionaries are written constructs that record words, along with their pronunciations,
meanings, and perhaps examples of use. Dictionaries list words alphabetically. They do not and
cannot contain everything that a native speaker would recognize as words of their language –
dictionaries have no need to record regularly inflected forms of words. The dictionary does not
need to list all the words that we know or that we could create, because once we know word
formation rules, so we can produce and understand potentially absolute numbers of new words
from the morphemes available to us.
So, we cannot rely on dictionaries to answer the question “Is xyz a word?” On the one hand,
dictionaries don’t list all the words of any language. They can’t list all derivatives with living
prefixes and suffixes, or all technical, scientific, or slang words. For the most part, dictionaries
do not fix or codify the words of a language, but rather reflect the words that native speakers
use. Those words are encoded in what we will call the mental lexicon.
The mental lexicon
By the mental lexicon we mean the sum total of everything an individual speaker knows about
the words of her language. This knowledge includes information about pronunciation, category
(part of speech), and meaning, but also information about syntactic features. Each person’s
mental lexicon is sure to contain things that are different from other people’s mental lexicons.
Mental lexicon is a sort of internalized dictionary that contains many numbers of words that
we can produce, or at least understand when we hear them. Our mental lexicon is organized as
a complex web of entries that are linked in various ways.
The acquisition of lexical knowledge
You might think that the learning of new words is a simple matter: someone points at something
and you learn that. This may be the way that we learn some words, but surely not the way we
learn the majority of words in our mental lexicons.
Although parents may point to things in a picture book and name them for a child, or school
children may be asked to memorize a list of vocabulary words, we learn most words without
clear instruction.
It is believed that both children and adults are able to do what called fast mapping. Fast
mapping is the ability to pick up new words on the basis of a few random exposures to them.
Children not only learn individual words, but they learn the rules that allow them to create and
understand new words.
The organization of the mental lexicon: storage versus rules
Although linguists like to describe our knowledge of words as a mental lexicon, we know that
the mental lexicon is not organized alphabetically like a dictionary. Rather, it is a complex web
composed of stored items that may be related to each other by the sounds that form them and
by their meanings.
If I asked you how to form the past tense of a verb in English, you would probably say that you
usually add an -ed. And then you might point out that there are a number of verbs that have
irregular past tenses like sing~sang, tell~told, win~won, fly~flew, and the like.
The pronunciation of the past tenses can be [t] sound, [əd] sound, or [d] sound.
We do not choose the pronunciation of the past tense at random. Rather, the choice of which of
the three endings to use depends on the final sound of the verb. The words that end in voiceless
sounds get the [t] pronunciation. And all the rest get the [d] pronunciation.
For instance: stop, drop, pass = [t], end, wait = [əd], and learn, show = [d]

Exercise:
 Determine if the following verbs end with [t], [əd], or [d] sounds.
Word Sound
Decide
Enjoy
Hate
Cook
Wait
Clean

 Clarify the distinction between a dictionary and a mental lexicon.

 Lexeme formation: the familiar
Most native speakers of English will recognize that words like unwipe, head bracelet or
MacDonaldization are made up of several meaningful pieces, and will be able to split them into
those pieces:
un / wipe head / bracelet McDonald / ize / ation
These pieces are called morphemes, the minimal meaningful units that are used to form words.
Some of the morphemes can stand alone as words: wipe, head, bracelet, McDonald. These are
called free morphemes. The morphemes that cannot stand alone are called bound
morphemes.
In the examples above, the bound morphemes are un-, -ize, and -ation. Bound morphemes come
in different varieties. Those are prefixes and suffixes; the former are bound morphemes that
come before the base of the word, and the latter bound morphemes that come after the base.
Together, prefixes and suffixes can be grouped together as affixes.
New lexemes that are formed with prefixes and suffixes on a base are often referred to as
derived words, and the process by which they are formed as derivation.
The base is the semantic core of the word to which the prefixes and suffixes attach. For
example, wipe is the base of unwipe, and McDonald is the base of McDonaldization.
Frequently, the base is a free morpheme.
Morphologists therefore make a distinction between affixes and bound bases.
Bound bases are morphemes that cannot stand alone as words, but are not prefixes or suffixes.
An example of a "bound base" morpheme is -sent in the word dissent.
Affixes need to attach to a base, only roots can be free. An "affix" is a bound morpheme that
occurs before or after a base.

Types of morphemes
What are the differences between stem and root words?
A root is the most basic part of a word, which carries the fundamental meaning, and cannot be
further broken down. Root is a single morpheme onto which affixes can be added to form larger
words.
Root is a simple bound form while stem is a complex bound form.
A stem is made up of a root plus derivational affixes or processes, it is the part of the word that
can take inflections. Stem is a root or a combination of roots and affixes to which further affixes
are attached.
For instance: In the word “workers”, the root is “work” by removing both the inflectional suffix
“-s” and the derivational suffix “-er”.
The stem is “worker” by removing only the inflectional suffix “-s”, which is the root plus a
derivational morpheme, and the base is “worker” too, by removing the last suffix.

 Affixation
Word formation rules
Prefixes and suffixes usually have special requirements for the sorts of bases they can attach
to. Some of these requirements concern the phonology (sounds) of their bases, and others
concern the semantics (meaning) of their bases but the most basic requirements are often the
syntactic part of speech or category of their bases.
The suffix -ness attaches to nouns, but not to verbs or adjectives. For example: redness,
happiness, wholeness, commonness, niceness.
The prefix un- attaches to adjectives (where it means ‘not’) and to verbs (where it means
‘reverse action’), but not to nouns. For example:
 un- on adjectives: unhappy, uncommon, unkind, unserious
 un- on verbs: untie, untwist, undress, unsnap
We might begin to build some of the rules that native speakers of English use for making words
with -ness or un- by stating their categorial requirements:
 Rule for -ness: Attach -ness to an adjective.
 Rule for un-: Attach un- to an adjective or to a verb.
Now we should also indicate what category of word results from using these affixes, and what
the resulting word means.
let’s look at two more affixes. In English we can form new verbs by using the suffixes -ize or
-ify. Both of these suffixes attach to either nouns or adjectives, resulting in verbs:
 -ize on adjectives: civilize, idealize, finalize
 -ize on nouns: crystallize, hospitalize, caramelize, animalize
 -ify on adjectives: purify, glorify, uglify
 -ify on nouns: speechify, classify, scarify
Word structure
When you divide up a complex word into its morphemes, as: unhappiness= un+ happy+ ness
We know that un- must first go on the base happy. Happy is an adjective, and un- attaches to
adjectives but does not change their category. The suffix -ness attaches only to adjectives and
makes them into nouns.

This diagram which is often called tree structure represents the details of a word's internal
organization.
What do affixes mean?
In some cases, affixes seem to have not much meaning at all. For example:
 -(a)tion in examination and realization
 -ment in agreement and placement
 -ity in purity and complexity
 -ness in happiness and sadness
 -al in refusal and disposal
The following affixes seem to have more semantic meat on their bones.
 -ee like employee
 -less like rainless
 re- like rewash
So, to speak: -ee on a verb indicates a person who undergoes an action; -less means something
like ‘without’; and re- means something like ‘again’.
Languages frequently have affixes like:
 personal affixes: the suffix -er (writer)
 negative affixes: the prefixes un- (unhappy)
 prepositional affixes: prefixes like over- and out- (overfill, outrun)

 Compounding
Derivation is not the only way of forming new words. Many languages also form words by a
process called compounding. Compounds are words that are composed of two (or more) bases,
roots, or stems. In English we generally use free bases to compose compounds, as the examples
show:
 compounds of two nouns: dog bed, book store
 compounds of two adjectives: icy cold, blue-green, red hot
 compounds of an adjective and a noun: greenhouse, blackboard, hard hat
 compounds of a noun and an adjective: sky blue, cherry red
Compound structure
The compounds windmill and hard hat would have the structures:

Compounds need not be limited to two bases. Compounding is what is called a recursive
process, in the sense that a compound of two bases can be compounded with another base, and
this compounded with still another base, so that we can eventually obtain very complex
compounds.
Some compounds can be ambiguous, and therefore can be represented by more than one
structure. For example, arctic cat observer, might have this structure:

Often, the more complex the compound is, the greater the possibility of multiple
interpretations, and therefore multiple structures.
English has bound bases as well as free bases, and when we put two of them together, we might
call these forms compounds as well. Some linguists call them neo-classical compounds as the
bound bases usually derive from Greek and Latin. They are compounds where often the word
elements were taken from the classical languages (Greek and Latin) and were combined in new
ways in English. For instance, English compounds on bound bases: psychopath, pathology, and
dermatitis.
Types of compounds
In compounds, the head is the element that serves to determine both the part of speech and the
semantic kind denoted by the compound as a whole. For example, in English the base that
determines the part of speech of compounds such as greenhouse or sky blue is always the
second one; the compound greenhouse is a noun, as house is, and sky blue is an adjective as
blue is.
 attributive compound.
 coordinative compounds.
 subordinative compounds.
  Conversion
Conversion is word-formation technique of forming a word from a formally identical but
categorically different word without adding morphological exponent. In other words,
conversion refers to the process of changing or converting the class of a word without changing
its form. The word email, for instance, can be used as a verb in Modern English though it was
only a noun in the past.
Zero affixation: an analysis of conversion in which a change of part of speech or semantic
category is affected by a phonologically null affix. For example, singular sheep – plural sheep-
Ø.
In morphology, a null morpheme or zero morpheme is a morpheme that has no phonetic form.
In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. The null morpheme is represented as
either the figure zero (0) or the empty set symbol ∅.
Although we often form new lexemes by affixation or compounding, in English it is also
possible to form new lexemes merely by shifting the category or part of speech of an already
existing lexeme without adding an affix. This means of word formation is often referred to as
conversion or functional shift. In English, we often create new verbs from nouns, as the
examples: table to table

 Minor processes
Affixation, compounding, and conversion are the most common ways of forming new words,
at least in English. In addition, there are a number of less common ways in which new lexemes
may be formed.
 Coinage: refers to the creation of entirely new, previously nonexistent words or terms
in a language. It is simply that speakers invent or coin new words to denote previously
nonexistent objects or concepts. For instance, blivet means ‘an intractable problem’.
 Backformation: is a word creation process in which prefixes or suffixes are removed
from existing words. For instance, the word "edit," which comes from the word "editor,"
with the suffix "-or" being removed. This verb means to make changes or corrections
to a document or piece of writing.
 Blending: is a process of word formation in which parts of lexemes that are not
themselves morphemes are combined to form a new lexeme. Familiar examples of
blends are words like brunch, a combination of breakfast and lunch, or smog, a
combination of smoke and fog.
 Acronyms and initialisms: When the first letters of words that make up a name or a
phrase are used to create a new word, the results are called acronyms or initialisms. CD,
PIN, and RIP are example of acronyms. CD is acronym of the word compact disc, PIN
is from personal identification number, and RIP is from rest in peace.
Initialisms are similar to acronyms in that they are composed from the first letters of a
phrase, but unlike acronyms, they are pronounced as a series of letters like FBI.
Both terms refer to abbreviations made up of a set of capitalized letters. The major difference
between acronyms and initialisms is that an acronym can be (and is) pronounced as a single
word, while an initialism is pronounced as a series of letters.
 Clipping: is a means of creating new words by shortening already existing words. For
instance, bot (robot), phone (telephone), varsity (university), net (Internet), and Maths,
which is a clipped form of mathematics.
Exercise:
 Divide the following words into morphemes and label each morpheme as a prefix,
suffix, free base, or bound base.
non-morphological
telephonic
overcompensation
reheatability

 List the morphemes in each word below, and state whether each morpheme is free
(F) or bound (B).
1. creating 4. unhealthy
2. poetic 5. waiter
3. modernize 6. reconsider
7. keys 8. Incompletion

 Identify the root in these words by underlining it and state which syntactic
category it belongs to.
kindness fried gamers heavily grandfathers

 Identify the suffixes by underlining them.

Singing unhappy mechanism brother blackboard

 Identify the prefixes by underlining them.

Rewarded misfortune establish submit

 For each word below, draw a word tree.

Repurify unbelievable
 What is Morphology
Morphology is the study of word formation, or the structure of the word, including the ways
new words are coined in the languages of the world. As a native speaker of your language, you
have the knowledge of how to form new words, and every day you recognize and understand
new words that you’ve never heard before.
What is Word?
Words are the smallest independent units of language.
What is Morpheme?
Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of language. Simple words like car,
home or yellow are morphemes. A morpheme should meet the following three basic
characteristics:

 It is a word or part of word that has meaning.

 It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful segments without changing its meaning.
 It has the same stable meaning in different verbal environments.
The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one syllable: dog, and -s, a plural morpheme.
While the word technique consists of only one morpheme having two syllables.
So, we can define a word as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language.
Words that consist of only one morpheme, like pistachio, just or orange termed simple or
simplex words because we cannot be divided into smaller parts that carry information about
its meaning or function. While words that are made up of more than one morpheme, like
blackboard, opposition and intellectual are called complex words.

What are Lexemes?

Lexemes can be thought of as families of words that differ only in their grammatical endings
or grammatical forms; singular and plural forms of a noun (class, classes), present, past, and
participle forms of verbs (walk, walks, walked, walking), different forms of a pronoun (I, me,
my, mine) each represent a single lexeme.

What is the difference between Word Tokens and Word Types?

Types are word forms whereas Tokens are occurrences of word forms.
For example: hello, hi, good morning are three different tokens of the type "greeting"
"They lay back on the San Francisco grass and looked at the stars and their"
In the instance above, if you will just count the number of words (separated by space) in this
sentence it will be 15 but if you are considering San Francisco as one token so there will be 14
Tokens in total. So, Tokens are the number of individual words in the text.
Now, consider the above sentence: the, and are appearing two types so count them only one
time. Again consider San Francisco as one term and they and their have the same root word so
also count them 1 time only, so you will get total 11 types.
So, Type is a word forms. There are many forms to any particular word in the English language,
that is, verb, noun, adjective and adverb. With small changes words can take up different forms.

Is Ali a word? Or “Is xyz a REAL word?

the answer of these questions is to run for the dictionary; if it’s a real word it must to be in the
dictionary. But think about this answer for just a bit, who determines what goes in the dictionary
in the first place? what if dictionaries differ in whether they list a particular word?
Some dictionaries list some words meanwhile the others do not. Thus, what all these questions
suggest is that we each have a mental lexicon. It is a sort of internalized dictionary that contains
many numbers of words that we can produce, or at least understand when we hear them. But
we also have a set of word formation rules which allows us to create new words and
understand new words when we face them.

Why do languages have morphology?

One reason for having morphology is: to form new lexemes from old ones. We will refer to
this as lexeme formation. Lexeme formation can do one of three things. It can change the part
of speech (or category) of a word, for example, turning verbs into nouns or adjectives, or nouns
into adjectives, as you can see in the examples:
Verb Noun Play Player
Verb Adjective Speed Speedy
Noun Adjective Pain Painful
Some rules of lexeme formation do not change category, but they do add substantial new
meaning, for example:
Adjective Adjective Happy Unhappy
Noun Noun Orphan Orphanage
Verb Verb Read Reread
And some rules of lexeme formation both change category and add substantial new meaning,
like:
Verb Adjective Wash Washable
Noun Verb Louse Delouse
On the other hand, we sometimes use morphology even when we don’t need new lexemes.
For example, we saw that each lexeme can have a number of word forms. The lexeme WALK
has forms like walk, walks, walked, walking that can be used in different grammatical contexts.
When we change the form of a word so that it fits in a particular grammatical context, we are
concerned with what linguists call inflection. Inflectional word formation is word formation
that expresses grammatical distinctions like number (singular vs. plural); tense (present vs.
past); person (first, second, or third); and case (subject, object, possessive), among others. It
does not result in the creation of new lexemes, but merely changes the grammatical form of
lexemes to fit into different grammatical contexts.

Exercises:
 Are the following words simple or complex?
Word Simple or complex
Swim
Unbreakable
Writer
Quicker
Hungry
Eat
Banana

 Do the words in the following pairs belong to the same lexeme or to different
lexemes?
Pairs Type
revolve revolution
revolution revolutions
revolve dissolve
go went
wash rewash

 What words belong to the same word family or lexeme as sing?

 Inflection

The main distinction between inflectional and derivation is that:

Inflection morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word like -s noun plural like
cats, -'s noun possessive like boy's, -s verb present tense like she writes, -ing verb present
participle like she is listening, -ed verb simple past like walked, -er adjective comparative like
bigger, -est adjective superlative like biggest.
While derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word such as prefix
un- and suffix -er.
Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new
lexemes, but rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical
contexts. For instance; walk- walked, tall- taller etc.
We’ve seen that new lexemes can be derived using all sorts of different formal processes of
word formation: affixation, compounding, conversion, internal stem change, reduplication,
templatic morphology.
Inflectional word formation makes use of almost all of these types of word formation rules as
well, with the possible exception of compounding.
Types of inflection
 Number
Perhaps the most familiar inflectional category for speakers of English is number. In English,
nouns can be marked as singular or plural:
 Singular cat, mouse, ox, child
 Plural cats, mice, oxen, children
Although the vast majority of nouns pluralize in English by adding -s some nouns form their
plurals irregularly. For instance, tooth- teeth

 Person
 Gender and noun class
 Case
 Tense and aspect
Tense and aspect are inflectional categories that usually pertain to verbs. Tense refers to the
point of time of an event in relation to another point – generally the point at which the speaker
is speaking.
In present tense the point in time of speaking and of the event spoken about are the same.
In past tense the time of the event is before the time of speaking.
And in future tense the event time is after the time of speaking.
In English, we mark the past tense using the inflectional suffix -ed on verbs (walked, played),
but there is no inflectional suffix for future tense. Instead, we use a separate auxiliary verb
"will" to form the future tense (will walk, will play).
Past, present, and future are not the only possible tenses; some languages distinguish several
kinds of past tense and several kinds of future tense, based on how close or distant the event
spoken about is from the time of speaking.
Aspect conveys information about the internal composition of the event or “the way in which
the event occurs in time”.
One of the most frequently expressed aspectual distinctions that can be found in the languages
of the world is the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect. With perfective
aspect, an event is viewed as completed; we look at the event from the outside, and its internal
structure is not relevant. With imperfective aspect, on the other hand, the event is viewed as
on-going; we look at the event from the inside, as it were. In English, when we say I ate the
apple, we not only place the action in the past tense, but also look at it as a completed whole.
But if we say I was eating the apple, although the action is still in the past, we focus on the
event as it is progressing. Other forms of aspect focus on particular points in an event. Inceptive
aspect focuses on the beginning of an event. Continuative aspect focuses on the middle of the
event as it progresses, and completive on the end.
A third category of aspectual distinction can be called quantificational. Quantificational
aspectual distinctions concern things like the number of times an action is done or an event
happens – once or repeatedly – or how frequently an action is done. Among the quantificational
aspects are semelfactive, iterative, and habitual aspects. Actions that are done just once are
called semelfactive. Iterative aspect for something that is done repeatedly and habitual aspect
for something that is usually or characteristically done. For instance:
Inceptive: She began to walk.
Habitual: She always/usually walks.
Continuative: She keeps on walking.
Iterative: She reads over and over.

 Voice
Voice is a category of inflection that allows different noun phrases to be focused in sentences.
In the active voice in a sentence with an agent and a patient, the agent is focused by virtue of
being the subject of the sentence. For instance, the cat chased the mouse.
But in the passive voice the patient is the subject of the sentence, and it gets the focus. For
instance, the mouse was chased by the cat.
 Mood and modality
Inflection in English
English is a language that is quite poor in inflection. The distinction between singular and plural
is marked on nouns.

 Singular cat, mouse, ox, child

 Plural cats, mice, oxen, children
English verbs inflect for past tense, but not for future, and there are two participles (present
with -ing and past with -ed) that together with auxiliary verbs help to signal various aspectual
distinctions.
The progressive, which expresses, among other things, on-going actions, is formed with the
auxiliary be plus the present participle:
 Present progressive: I am writing the assignment.
 Past progressive: I was writing the assignment.
 Future progressive: I will be writing the assignment.
The perfect expresses something that happened in the past but still has relevance to the present.
For instance, I have eaten the last piece of blueberry pie.
The passive voice in English is formed with the past participle as well, but the auxiliary be is
used. For instance, the pages of the book were torn by the child
English has both regular and irregular inflections. All of our regular inflections are suffixal, but
irregular forms are often formed by internal stem change (ablaut and umlaut) or by a
combination of internal stem change and suffixation. Examples of irregular forms are:
 Irregular noun plurals
foot feet mouse mice ox oxen child children
 Irregular verb forms
sing sang sung sit sat sat write wrote written tell told told
Exercise:
 For each word below, indicate whether the word is morphologically simple (S),
includes an inflectional affix (I), or includes a derivational affix (D).
1. rider 6. reader
2. colder 7. redder
3. silver 8. radish
4. lens 9. redness
5. legs 10. rotation
 Lexeme formation: further afield
 Affixes: beyond prefixes and suffixes
As you know, prefixes and suffixes are types of affixes that respectively go before or after a
base. These are not the only positions in which affixes can occur.

 Infixes
Many people don’t realize it’s possible to insert an affix to the middle of a word—these are
called infixes. Infixes less in English and prevalent in other languages.

 Circumfixes
A circumfix consists a prefix and a suffix that together create a new lexeme from a base. That
means it attach to both the beginning and the end of the word. It made up from prefix and
suffix. It is less common in English than in other languages.

 Interfixes
Interfixes or linking elements is a part of a word that is placed between two morphemes and
lacks a semantic meaning.

 Simulfixes
A simulfix is a change or replacement of vowels or consonants (usually vowels) which changes
the meaning of a word. For example; eat~ ate, tooth~ teeth, man~ men, mouse~mice.

 Transfixes or templatic morphology.

 Internal stem change

Most of the forms of lexeme formation have involved adding something to a base or combining
bases. Some languages have means of lexeme formation that involve changing the quality of
an internal vowel or consonant of a base, root, or stem. Such processes are called internal stem
change or apophony.
internal stem change is morphological process which changes a vowel or consonant in the
stem. Also sometimes called simulfixation.
Internal vowel change is called ablaut. For instance; the verb sing, sang, sung and its related
noun song, while internal consonant change is called consonant mutation.
 Reduplication is a morphological process in which all or part of the base is repeated
such as ding-dong, flip-flop, or tip-top.
  Templatic morphology
katab ‘wrote’
kattab ‘caused to write’
kaatab ‘corresponded’
ktatab ‘wrote, copied’
kutib ‘was written’ (perfective passive).
Each word has a different pattern of vowels and consonants, and each expresses a different
concept. What we find in Arabic is called templatic morphology.
Templatic morphology is a kind of morphological process in which words are derived by
means of arranging morphemes according to meaningful patterns of consonants and vowels.
 Productivity and creativity
Consider the examples:
a. warm warmth true truth
b. modern modernity pure purity
c. happy happiness dark darkness
In each case, we have adjectives and nouns that are derived from them. As a first pass, we may
hypothesize the three rules of lexeme formation:
a. Rule for -th: -th attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns.
b. Rule for -ity: -ity attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns.
c. Rule for -ness: -ness attaches to adjectives, and creates nouns.
Processes of lexeme formation that can be used by native speakers to form new lexemes are
called productive. Those that can no longer be used by native speakers, are unproductive; so,
although we may recognize the -th in warmth as a suffix, we never make use of it in making
new words. The suffixes -ity and -ness, on the other hand, can still be used, although perhaps
not to the same degree.
Factors contributing to productivity
One factor is what is called transparency. Words formed with transparent processes can be
easily segmented, such that there is a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning.
In other words, when we attach an affix to a base, the phonological form (the pronunciation)
of both morphemes stays the same, and the meaning of the derived word is exactly what we
would expect by adding the meaning of the affix to that of the base. Let’s look further at the
case of -ness and -ity, this time considering the additional examples:
a. candid candidness pink pinkness
b. pure purity available availability
In all the -ness examples in (a), it is easy to divide the complex words into base and suffix. The
base is always pronounced in the derived word as it is in isolation. And the suffix always creates
a noun meaning ‘state of being “adjective”’, whatever the adjective.
Words formed with -ness are perfectly transparent. The suffix -ity is somewhat less transparent.
When you pronounce them, you see that -ity often has the effect of changing the phonological
form of its base – sometimes its stress pattern, and sometimes both stress and phonological
segments in the base.
Transparency is not the only factor that contributes to productivity. Another factor that is
important is what we might call frequency of base type. By this, we mean the number of
different bases that might be available for affixes to attach to, thus resulting in new words. If
an affix attaches only to a limited range of bases, it has less possibility of giving rise to lots of
new words, and it will therefore be less productive. Consider, for example, the suffix -esque in
English, which means something like ‘having the style of ’. It attaches to nouns, but mostly to
concrete ones and in fact, most often to proper names. Indeed, although it attaches pretty freely
to names, it seems most comfortable on names that have at least two syllables. Compared to a
suffix that could attach to any noun at all, -esque would be less productive.
The final factor that contributes to productivity is what we might call usefulness. A process of
lexeme formation is useful to the extent that speakers of a language need new words of a
particular sort. For example, to be able to form a noun meaning ‘the state of being X’ from an
adjective, whatever X means, so both -ness and -ity are highly useful affixes. On the other
hand, consider the suffix -ess in English. It used to be useful to be able to coin words referring
to jobs performed by women or positions held by women such as murderess, or authoress. But
with the rise of feminism and efforts to promote gender-neutral language such words are not
used, and the need for new words using this suffix has almost died out. So, the affix has become
far less productive, perhaps completely unproductive.
Restrictions on productivity
We learned that there could be different sorts of restrictions on what sorts of base an affix may
attach to, including:
 categorial restrictions: Almost all affixes are restricted to bases of specific categories.
For example, -ity and -ness attach to adjectives, -ize attaches to nouns and adjectives,
or un- attaches to adjectives or verbs.
 phonological restrictions: for example, -ize prefers nouns and adjectives that consist of
two or more syllables, where the final syllable does not bear primary stress. The suffix
-en, which forms verbs from adjectives, attaches only to bases that end in obstruents.
So, we can get darken, brighten, and deafen but *slimmen and *tallen, which end in
sonorant consonants, are impossible.
Note: sounds in the languages of the world involving turbulent noise are referred to in
generative phonology as 'obstruents'.
 the meaning of the base: For example, negative un- prefers bases that are not themselves
negative in meaning. We find unlovely, unhappy but not *unugly or *unsad.
 etymological restrictions: for example, there are affixes in English that prefer to attach
to bases that are native – for example the suffix -en that forms adjectives from nouns
like wooden. On the other hand, another suffix -ic that forms adjectives from nouns like
dramatic will not attach to native bases, only to bases that are borrowed into English
from French or Latin.
 syntactic restrictions: for example, the suffix -able generally attaches to transitive verbs,
specifically verbs that can be passivized. So, from the transitive verb love we can get
loveable, but from the intransitive verb snore there is no *snorable.
Note: A transitive verb is a verb that requires an object to receive the action.
Productivity versus creativity
Some morphologists make a distinction between morphological productivity and
morphological creativity.
When processes of lexeme formation are truly productive, we use them to create new words
without noticing that we do so. Similarly, when hearers are exposed to a productively formed
complex word, they understand it, but usually don’t note that it’s a new word.
Morphological creativity is the field of unproductive processes like suffixation of -th or
marginal lexeme formation processes like blending or backformation. It occurs when speakers
use such processes consciously to form new words, often to be humorous or playful or to draw
attention to those words. For example, speakers might use the unproductive suffix -th to form
an adjective like coolth (in contrast to warmth), trying to be clever.