Fernández-Domínguez, Jesús. Productivity in English Word-formation: An Approach to N+N Compounding. European University Studies. Series 21: Linguistics. Vol. 341. Peter Lang AG: 2009. Paperback: ISBN: 9783039118083 Pages: 204 Price: Europe EURO 38.00
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This book is a contribution to the study of morphological productivity, that is, the property of word-formation processes whereby new words are created to satisfy a naming need. It presents an up-to-date picture of this phenomenon, characterising its major attributes and addressing neighbouring theoretical concepts like *availability, profitability* or *lexicalisation*. Links are also established between those notions and N+N compounding, a word-formation process regarded as very
productive but traditionally overlooked in studies of this type. Unlike other productivity surveys, mostly directed at affixation, a corpus of N+N compounds is here compiled to which the mainstream models of productivity are applied. This allows detecting the pros and cons of those proposals and to propose a model of productivity. Two measures, *Indicator of
Profitability* (*p*) and *Trend of Profitability* (*P*), are introduced which can be applied across word-formation processes and are able to compute their productivity based on semantic categories.
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