英语论文网

mportant of these, on the other hand, have remained living and PRODUCTIVE on account of their strongly-felt meaning' (Lieber, 1838, p.221). These words are translated by Bauer. After this term occurred, many scholars have defined productivity. Crystal and Chomsky name productivity as 'used in linguistics to refer to the creative capacity of language users to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences'. This is a straight- forward definition. Arnoff has stated that the term productivity is widely used in studies of derivational morphology. There are many elements are productive in linguistic. Affix may be productive. A morphological process may be productive. A word could be productive. Word-formation rules would be productive. Therefore, productivity is a feature of English language as a whole. However, the conception of morphological productivity is problematic.

Firstly, morphological process is connected with the ability and creativity of the speaker. Productivity is based on the creativity of new words. It is a process which operated with actual words and a particular morphological process. A morphological process can be seen as productive if the speaker forms new words with it. The question is how to define 'new' words. Whether it is based on the level of sentences, words, phrases in the sense of never been heard before or not. We may say that the lower the lever is, the fewer the proportion of the new words. So, the combination of new words might be seen as a multifaceted problem in terms of frequency. Take Times corpus as an example, there are mainly 80 million words in it, but only 348 new words are formed by the suffix -ness and 143 by -ity. However, the definition of new narrowing that, a word is new if it occurs only once in a corpus and does not show in other ways, like in a dictionary. Bayyen and Renoir make another definition of 'new' according to the above discussion on the basis of language community and see language as a whole, 'a word is only new if it has not appeared elsewhere in the language community, whose language is represented by corpora and dictionaries' (Plag, 1999, p.7). However, there are still other conceptions we need to notice is the language individual user.

Although a word may be familiar with some of the speakers in the language community, it will be new for some individual language user. From the point of psycholinguistic, every language user could store very few rare words not appeared in their mental lexicon, that is to say, for a certain language community, most of them roughly store all the words in their speech community. Therefore, the question of 'new' words is resolved. For a particular speech community, they basically recognize the same words occurred in their field.

3.2 Degrees of productivity

The degree of productivity is often classified as the aspects of a quantitative notion of productivity.

Some linguists have named a morphological process as either productive or unproductive while others suggest there are degrees of productivity. The degree of productivity can be mainly classified into three kinds: 'productive, unproductive or intermediate stage' (Bauer, 2001, p,16). Pike gives the notion 'semi-productive' for intermediate stage, which is the morphological is 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。