A course In Modern English Lexicology

§ 8. Productive Word-Formation fective means of enriching the vocabulary.
The most widely used means are affixation (prefixation mainly for verbs and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns) and composition (most productive in nouns and adjectives).
'New’ words that appear as a result of productive word-formation are not entirely new as they are all made up of elements already available in the language. The newness of these words resides in the particular combination of the items previously familiar to the language speaker. As has already been mentioned productivity of derivative devices that give rise to novel vocabulary units is fundamentally relative and it follows that there are no patterns which can be called ‘fully’ productive.
Productive patterns in each part of speech, with a set of individual structural and semantic constraints, serve as a formal expression of the regular semantic relationship between different classes or semantic groupings of words. Thus the types of new words that may appear in this or that lexical-grammatical class of words can be predicted with a high degree of probability. The regularity of expression of the underlying semantic relations, firmly rooted in the minds of the speakers, make 1 See ‘Word-Formation’, § 4, p. 112. 184
the derivational patterns bidirectional rules, that is, the existence of one class of words presupposes the possibility of appearance of the other which stands in regular semantic relations with it. This can be clearly observed in the high degree of productivity of conversion.1 For instance the existence and frequent use of the noun denoting an object presupposes the possibility of the verb denoting an action connected with i t , e.g. the nouns stream, sardine, hi-fi, timetable, lead to the appearance of verbs to stream — ‘to divide students into separate classes according to level of intelligence’, to sardine — ‘to pack closely’; to hi-fi — ‘to listen to hi-fi recordings’; to timetable — ‘to set a timetable’. Similarly a verb denoting an action presupposes a noun denoting an act, result, or instance of this action as in the new words, e.g. a holdup, a breakdown, a layout, etc.
The clarity and stability of the structural and semantic relations underlying productive patterns allows of certain stretching of individual constraints on the structure and meaning of the derivational bases making the pattern highly productive. Highly productive patterns of this type are not many. The derivational affixes which are the ICs of these patterns such as
-ness, -er, mini-, over- become unusually active and are felt according to some scholars “productive as individual units” as compared to affixes
“productive in a certain pattern, but not in another.” The suffixal nominal patterns with suffixes -ness and -er deserve special mention. The suffix -
ness is associated with names of abstract qualities and states. Though it is regularly added to adjectival bases, practically the range of bases the suffix can be collocated with is both structurally and semantically almost unlimited, e.g. otherness, alone-ness, thingness, oneness, well-to-doness, out-of-the-placeness, etc. The only exception is the verbal bases and the sphere of the derivational pattern a + -ity -> N.
The nominal suffix -er denoting an active doer may serve as another example. The suffix gives numerous suffixal and compound nouns and though it is largely a deverbal suffix as in brain-washer, a double-talker, a sit-inner new nouns are freely formed from bases of other parts of speech, e.g. a roomer, a YCLer, a one-winger, a ganger, etc.
Yet the bulk of productive patterns giving rise to freely-formed and easily predictable lexical classes of new words have a set of rigid structural and semantic constraints such as the lexical-grammatical class and structural type of bases,2 the semantic nature of the base, etc. The degree of productivity is also connected with a certain power of analogy attached to each pattern.
The following productive types giving the greatest number of new vocabulary items may be mentioned: deverbal suffixal adjectives denoting passive possibility of the action (v + -able -> A), e.g. attachable, acceptable, livable-in, likeable, etc.; prefixal negative adjectives formed after two patterns: 1) (un- +