Productivity, vocabulary size, and new words. A response to Säily (2016)
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Kristian Berg
Kristian Berg (born 1978, PhD University of Oldenburg, 2012) is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg. His research focuses on the relation between morphology and spelling and on diachronic productivity, especially the role of new words, lexicalization and obsolescence.
Abstract
Säily (2016, Sociolinguistic variation in morphological productivity in eighteenth-century English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(1). 129–151) offers a very interesting way of gauging the productivity of a word-formation pattern when the corresponding token counts vary. However, I disagree with the operationalization of productivity that she uses. If we employ vocabulary size as an indicator of productivity, later stages in a language’s life will automatically be more productive. As an alternative, I suggest a neologism-based measure, which is preferable for various reasons.
About the author
Kristian Berg (born 1978, PhD University of Oldenburg, 2012) is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg. His research focuses on the relation between morphology and spelling and on diachronic productivity, especially the role of new words, lexicalization and obsolescence.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stefan Hartmann, Harald Baayen, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Unifying dimensions in coherence relations: How various annotation frameworks are related
- Alternating constructions with ditransitive geben in present-day German
- Less is more: why all paradigms are defective, and why that is a good thing
- Dependency profiles in the large-scale analysis of discourse connectives
- Productivity, vocabulary size, and new words. A response to Säily (2016)
- Predicting voice alternation across academic Englishes
- What we talk about when we talk about corpus frequency: The example of polysemous verbs with light and concrete senses
- Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in Parisian French
