Talk:Productivity (linguistics)

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:15, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Title
retitle to productivity? &mdash; ishwar  (S PEAK )  04:51, 2005 Apr 5 (UTC)
 * definitely. --Angr/comhrá 19:23, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"Inherited", "loans", "closed classes" and productivity
Angr had put in the following:


 * Non-productive grammatical processes represent a closed class; the forms that exist in a closed class are usually inherited forms, though exceptions exist (pronouns are generally considered a closed class, yet the English pronouns they, them, and their are loanwords).

This is mixed up, I think. Productive processes must by definition relate to open classes, but the identification of closed classes with non-productive processes is certainly not a complete thing. In any case, "inherited" w.r.t closed classes does not mean (I am sure) that a form is not a loan word, but (I expect) that speakers  "inherit" it from their own past learning or learn it from hearing others' already-formed structures rather than from applying the grammatical process. (I don't know whose term "inherited" is in this context.) Whether or not "they", "them" and "their" are loanwords or not is irrelevant to the question of whether English pronouns form a closed class. (There is other evidence that it is not a completely closed class, from innovations like "y'all all" or "sumpn-r-other" which have become quite standard for some speakers.)


 * It's definitely not a closed class. Examples include "youse" (2nd person plural) in Scouse and other dialects, or various gender-neutral pronouns. --DavidHopwood 00:28, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

So, anyway, I changed it to what seems to me to be more accurate/helpful.

--Lavintzin 03:09, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I answered on your talk page before noticing you had discussed on this talk page. Angr/ talk 06:02, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
 * And I answered you there before seeing this comment here. Ring around the rosie. --Lavintzin 23:46, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Is {en} productive?
I don't speak the hacker sociolect, but I have a hunch that even within that these {en} plurals start off as, and remain, merely jocular. Do people use them unselfconsciously? -- Hoary 10:02, 6 March 2007 (UTC)


 * @Hoary To my personal experiences, especially around my local area, I've never heard anybody use it as such; although I might be incorrect. Nihilismo01 (talk) 04:02, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Is unselfconsciousness a necessary part of productivity? --Lavintzin 15:20, 6 March 2007 (UTC) (I suspect you are right that they don't, at least at first.)

Profitability and Availability
I'm just reading a text by Laurie Bauer and he differantiates between profitability and availabilty, as subcategories of productivity. I think it would be really helpful to include this in the article. Unfortunately I'm not a native speaker, so I would not want to do it. Furthermore I'm not quite sure, whether I understood the concepts correctly. This can be found in Bauer, Laurie. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. 72. Bromatom (talk) 15:23, 27 January 2011 (UTC)


 * @Bromatom It's a sound hypothesis. Being able to distinguish those two subcategories: "Availability" and "Productivity", is a clear indication of differences between concrete forms and creative forms. Nihilismo01 (talk) 04:12, 17 October 2023 (UTC)