Productivity In Shape: Formal Generality And Regularity

 Consider the suffix ‘-ness’. It is formally general in the sense that, when attached to most
adjectives, it yields an abstract noun which is either in common use (‘greyness’,
‘richness’) or would not need to be listed as a lexical item because its existence is
predictable, given the existence of the adjective.

 Thus, once one has learned the existence and meaning of the adjective ‘dioecious’, one
does not have to learn separately the existence of a noun ‘dioeciousness’.

 The suffix ‘-ness ‘ is also formally regular, in the sense that one can specify what sort of
structure an adjective must have in order to be a possible base for it: any structure
whatever.

 That is, whatever adjective ‘-ness ‘ is attached to, the result sounds like a possible noun,
even though it may not be one that is conventionally used (e.g. ‘sensitiveness’,
‘pureness’, ‘longness’). If native English speakers hear a non-English speaker using the
word ‘longness’ instead of ‘length’, they will almost certainly be able to understand what
the speaker means, even if ‘longness’ is not a word that they themselves would use

 Consider the suffixes ‘-ity ‘ and ‘-th’: with most adjectives, the result of attaching either
of these is something that is not only not an actual noun but also not a possible noun. For
example, *’greyth’ and *’richity’ sound not merely unconventional but un-English;

 This does not mean that both these suffixes are equally irregular. In fact, ‘-ity’ is formally
quite regular, in the sense that possible bases for it are easy to specify: adjectives in ‘-ive
‘(‘selective’, ‘passive’), ‘-able’ or –’ible’ (‘capable’, ‘visible’), ‘-al’ (‘local’, ‘partial’ ), ‘-
ar’ (‘insular’, ‘polar’), ‘-ic’ (‘electric’, ‘eccentric’), ‘-id’ (l’iquid’, ‘timid’ ) and ‘-ous’
(‘viscous’, ‘various’).
 Formally irregular are the relatively few nouns in ‘-ity ‘formed from adjectives outside
this range, e.g. ‘dense’, ‘immense’, ‘pure’, ‘rare’.
 Also capricious is the behaviour of adjectives in ‘-ous’, some of which preserve this
suffix in the allomorph ‘-os-’, e.g. ‘viscosity’, ‘curiosity’, while others lose it, e.g.
‘ferocity’; By contrast, ‘-th’ is formally quite irregular, in that the adjectives that choose
it share no common structural characteristic beyond the fact that they are monosyllabic
(‘deep,’ ‘wide’, ‘broad’, ‘long’, ‘strong’), a characteristic that they share with hundreds
of other adjectives

 The opposite the situation would be one in which a number of different lexemes exhibit a
regular pattern of semantic relationship, but without any formally regular derivational
processes accompanying it. Consider:
 Species horse pig cow sheep goose
 Adult: Male stallion boar bull ram gander
 Female mare sow cow ewe goose
 Young foal piglet calf lamb gosling
 Not many areas of vocabulary have such a tight semantic structure as this. The existence
of just a few such areas shows that reasonably complex patterns of semantic relationship
can sustain themselves without morphological underpinning. Morphology may help in
expressing such relationships but it is not essential. This reinforces further the need to
distinguish between two aspects of ‘productivity’: formal and semantic regularity.