Tài liệu ôn thi du học_4

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Tài liệu ôn thi du học_4 For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.orgChapter 3: Productivity 71With regard to all four measures we can see enormous differences between suffixes.Looking at the column for N, we can state that some affixes have high token figures (see-able, -ness, and -ize), which means that at least some of the words with these suffixes areused very often. Other kinds of derivatives are not used very often and have rather lowtoken frequencies (in particular -wise and -ful ‘measure’). Let us discuss the significance of the figures in table (6) in an exemplary fashionusing the two -ful suffixes which obviously - and perhaps surprisingly - differ from eachother significantly. What is called ‘measure -ful’ here is a nominal suffix used to formso-called measure partitive nouns such as cupful, handful, spoonful, while what I call here‘property -ful’ is an adjectival suffix used to form qualitative adjectives like careful,forgetful etc. The two homophonous suffixes have a similar extent of use V (136 vs 154different types) but differ greatly in the other columns of the table. Thus, words withmeasure -ful are not used very often in comparison to words with property -ful (N=2615vs N=77316). Many of the adjectival derivatives are highly frequent, as is evidenced bythe frequency spectrum of these words, illustrated in (7). I list the frequencies for the sixmost frequent items: frequencies of the most frequent adjectival -ful derivatives (BNC, written corpus)(7) derivative frequency successful 10366 useful 9479 beautiful 7964 powerful 7064 careful 4546 wonderful 4202These items alone account for more than half of the tokens of adjectival -ful, and eachindividual item is much more frequent than all nominal, i.e. ‘measure’, -ful derivativestogether. Comparing the number of hapaxes and the P values, we find a high figure fornominal -ful, which is a sure sign of its productivity. For illustration of the potential of For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.orgChapter 3: Productivity 72nominal -ful to be used for the creation of new forms, let us have a look at the twohapaxes bootful and stickful and the contexts in which they occur in the BNC:(8) We would have fished Tony out two or three kilometres down after the water had knocked him around a bit, and given him a dreadful bootful since he was wearing his Lundhags.(9) As the men at the windlass rope heaved and a long timber started to rise up and swing, the wheel on the pulley squealed like an injured dog and the man stationed at the top of the wall took a stickful of thick grease from a pot, leaned out, and worked it into the axle.Returning to table (6), we have to state that the measures often seem to contradict eachother. If we tried to rank the suffixes in terms of productivity, we would get differentrankings depending on the type of measure we use, which may seem somewhatunsatisfactory. However, we have to keep in mind that each measure highlights adifferent aspect of productivity. In particular, these aspects are– the number of forms with a given affix (‘extent of use’ V),– the number of neologisms attested in a given period.– the number of hapaxes in a given corpus (as an indicator of the amount of newlycoined derivatives)– the probability of encountering new formations among all derivatives of a certainmorphological category (‘productivity in the narrow sense’ P),To summarize our discussion of how productivity can be measured, it should havebecome clear that the different measures have the great advantage that they makecertain intuitive aspects of morphological productivity explicit and calculable.Furthermore, we have learned that productivity is largely a function of the frequency ofwords and that the reason for the connection between frequency and productivity liesin the nature of the storage and processing of (complex) words in the lexicon. For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.orgChapter 3: Productivity 735. Constraining productivityHaving quantitatively assessed that a certain process is productive or more or lessproductive than another one, the obvious next question is which factors influence therelative productivity of a given process? One factor ...