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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

Publisher: http://www.peterlang.com

URL:http://www.peterlang.com/Index.cfm?vLang=E&vSiteID=4&vSiteName=BookDetail%2Ecfm&VID=11808

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.