Linguistic Creativity and Word Formation

Abstract

Word formation and derivation, although receiving considerable attention on the part of theoretical and descriptive linguists (Aronoff 1975; Dardano 1978; Bauer 1983; Scalise 1984, etc.), have not yet been granted the same treatment in psycholinguistics from the point of view of both firstand second-language acquisition (but see Vasvari Fainberg 1983). This is rather surprising since derivation seems to be the perfect testing ground for a number of theoretical claims, whether they are concerned with linguistic structure, acquisitional processes, language transfer, language competence or firstand second-language pedagogy. This paper deals exclusively with lexical derivation as it is manifested in the oral and written production of Anglophone learners of Italian. There are four main assumptions underlying my analysis: 1. Lexical derivation belongs to that linguistic competence which is based on creativity. In other words, speakers have the ability not only to generate sentences never before heard, but also to create and understand derived words never before heard. 2. It follows from (1) above that no essential differences exist between native and non-native speakers regarding their ability to utilize this competence. Differences are apparent, however, at the level of production, and they will be discussed below. 3. Foreign language learners, contrary to the hypothesis expressed in Vizmuller (1983:78), do indeed engage in the spontaneous activity of deriving new words from those they already know by means of suffixation and prefixation. 4. Straight language transfer plays a relatively minor role in this particular linguistic process. Lexical (or morphological) derivation is basically a process which is used to form new words from those already existing in the language by means of prefixes, suffixes (and, less frequently, infixes). For a number of reasons, in a setting where foreign language acquisition takes place,