Morphological Productivity of Non-verbal Persian Derivational Suffixes in “Dependency Corpus”

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 Ph.D. candidate in General Linguistics, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor at Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Productivity covers a wide range of linguistic phenomena. Productivity is as much about syntactic phenomena; it can be related to morphological phenomena. The various definitions of productivity are reflected in the presentation of the approach and the method of productivity measurement. Studies on what and how to measure morphological productivity have been conducted since 1899.
It can be said, in 1976, Aronoff proposed the first method for quantitative measuring of morphological productivity in English. Baayen (2009), in productivity measurement, considered the possibility of finding new words made by derivational suffixes. Thus, he has developed quantitative morphological productivity measurement methods. Anshen and Aronoff (1998), describe productivity of how new words are made with a certain suffix. With this view, the productivity rate of each suffix is obtained. It means productivity becomes a probable continuum and it can be used to predict the rate of possible word construction. At both ends of this continuum, there are patterns that are "full-productive" and “non-productive”.
Of course, Palg (2006), also discusses the use of suffixes as overall “possibility" of language for constructing new words. The logical consequence of all morphological productivity analyzes is the presentation of various methods for quantitative measuring of the productivity of suffixes. Most studies on this field focus on the measurement and reliability and validity of each measurement. Despite more than thirty years of quantitative studies, Bauer (2004) argues that one of the empirical problems with these measurements is that "we do not yet have a reliable measure for productivity”. In Iran, Abbasi (2005), Rafiei (2008), Badakhshan (2010), Hemmasian (2010), Kheirabadi et al. (2010), Erfanian Qonsuli (2011), Mavvaji (2012), Amirarjmandi et al. (2013) and Farzaneh (2016) have studied on morphological productivity in Persian.
The main purpose of this study is to quantify the current productivity of non-verbal Persian derivational suffixes using different methods so that the probable productivity continuum of these suffixes is given.  This article also introduced and analyzed different methods for quantitative measurement of productivity in researchers' studies over the last thirty years. In this study, morphological productivity is assessed using a corpus-based approach. Additionally, according to Bauer (2004) and Baayen (2009) quantitative measurement framework, four frequency methods and two probability estimation methods have been used to measure morphological productivity.

Keywords

References

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ZABANPAZHUHI (Journal of Language Research)
Volume 15, Issue 46
May 2023
Pages 111-147

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