LING 3005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Neologism, Affix

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 3005
• Professor: Daniel Siddiqi

Document Summary

Need to find some way of measuring how productive a word/affix is. It doesn"t need to be measured, but it needs a way to be measurable. Problem: -ment, used to be productive, but no longer is. This doesn"t tell you how productive a word is, only how frequent it is (token frequency) Problem: not clear how to go about this. Dictionaries don"t add productive affixes and their word. Identifies restrictions on words, but that is hard. Verbs are un-bounded; you can always add a new verb to english. Ratio: how likely are we to use a word (possible words): infinity. How much do we actually use it (actual) Compare corpus versus dictionary and find new words. Ex, but, -ing forms are not in the dictionary. Way to measure productivity is to compare the number of words that end in ing in the corpus to all the times that ing forms can appear.