Chronicling the times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper

This study examines the productivity of five English derivational affixes in a British newspaper, the Times (London), in the period from September 1989 to December 1992. This diachronic corpus of roughly 80 million word tokens contains large numbers of neologisms. Thus, this corpus offers a good opportunity to test both qualitative and quantitative theories of morphological productivity. Our investigations support the usefulness of the quantitative formalization of the notion DECREE OF PRODUCTIVITY developed in Baayen 1992, 1993a. At the same time, they illustrate that productivity is a function of both text type and real time. An investigation of the morphological structure of the neologisms provides strong support for Aronoff's (1976) claim that the productivity of an affix may vary significantly with the morphological structure of the base word to which it attaches.*