The quantitative approach to morphological productivity first proposed by Baayen crucially refers to the relation between the number of hapax legomena formed with a given a‰x occurring in a su‰ciently large corpus and the total number of tokens of that a‰x sampled in the corpus. Most criticism against this measure focuses on its neglecting the role played by frequency in the evaluation of productivity. As an improvement of Baayen's procedure, a variable-corpus approach is proposed. Accordingly, the productivity values should be calculated at equal token numbers for di¤erent a‰xes instead of taking the di¤erent token numbers which result from sampling the whole corpus for all a‰xes, as in Baayen's works. This implies that variably-sized subcorpora must be sampled to compare a‰xes displaying di¤erent frequencies. On the basis of a 75-million-token newspaper corpus, the productivity values for several Italian a‰xes in the deverbal and deadjectival domain are calculated. The resulting rank proves linguistically plausible, avoiding the overestimation of productivity for low-frequency affixes typically occurring in fixed-corpus calculations. As a further advantage, the procedure proposed here makes it possible to deal satisfactorily with two problematic aspects usually neglected in previous investigations, namely, the quantitative impact of (i) allomorphies and lexicalizations and (ii) inner-cycle derivations on productivity measures.

How many inflectional classes displays the German substantive? As basic as this question may be, a satisfactory answer is still lacking. In this paper, the question will be tackled again, taking into consideration the contribution provided by several recent theoretical approaches to an adequate description and comprehension of the German inflectional system. On the other hand, the intricacies of the German plural constitute an optimal test bed to verify the empirical adequacy of recent theoretical thinking on language.

The paper addresses the question of the correspondence between constituent order in compounds and in syntax. While a strictly synchronic perspective does not lead us to any significant generalization as ascertained by Bauer (Language typology and language universals, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 2001), adopting a diachronic point of view allows us to formulate the question in general terms by making reference to the logical problem of what is the transition permitted from a certain synchronic stage to another. On the basis of a large language sample, it is shown that constituent order in compounds heavily relies on syntax. This must be understood in the terms of a diachronic universal reflecting Hawkins' (Word order universals, Academic Press, New York 1983) Double Acquisition Hypothesis. For this specific property of compounds, morphology does not seem to be autonomous from syntax, albeit the relation between morphology and syntax must be thought of as a multi-faceted one.

No abstract

No abstract

Inflection is generally considered to be more productive than derivation. To justify such an assumption, the syntactic function of inflectional morphology is contrasted with the mainly lexical function of derivational morphology. In this paper, the whole question will be carefully discussed with the help of recently developed quantitative approaches to productivity. On the basis of data taken from Italian, it will be shown that a quantitative approach to productivity can shed light on this intricate question by revealing the double nature of inflectional morphology, which on the one hand sides with derivational morphology because of its lexically conditioned inflectional classes. On the other, it scores very high productivity rates for the single inflectional categories in accordance with its syntactic function. Furthermore, the productivity rates of the inflectional categories considered are shown to be not uniform: several factors may influence their productivity, as for instance the substitutive usage of periphrases with modals, even in a language like Italian in which the latter are far less grammaticalized than in others.Parts of this paper were presented at the XI International Morphology Meeting held in Vienna, 14th-17th February 2004, and in lectures given at the Universities of Graz, L'Aquila, Marburg, Roma Tre, and Salerno. I wish to express my gratitude to the people who discussed with me the ideas contained in the paper, and in particular to my colleague and friend Davide Ricca, who has been sharing with me the pleasure and the hard work of conducting quantitative investigations on Italian morphology. Many ideas contained in the paper are the result of constant and animated discussions with him. Finally, I am very much indebted to the editor Ingo Plag and two anonymous reviewers for remarkable observations and comments. Needless to say, I carry the full responsability for errors and misunderstandings contained in the paper.

No abstract

No abstract