Measuring and Comparing the Productivity of Mandarin Chinese Suffixes

Abstract

The present study attempts to measure and compare the morphological productivity of five Mandarin Chinese suffixes: the verbal suffix -hua, the plural suffix -men, and the nominal suffixes -r, -zi, and -tou. These suffixes are predicted to differ in their degree of productivity : -hua and -men appear to be productive, being able to systematically form a word with a variety of base words, whereas -zi and -tou (and perhaps also -r) may be limited in productivity. Baayen [1989, 1992] proposes the use of corpus data in measuring productivity in word formation. Based on word-token frequencies in a large corpus of texts, his token-based measure of productivity expresses productivity as the probability that a new word form of an affix will be encountered in a corpus. We first use the token-based measure to examine the productivity of the Mandarin suffixes. The present study, then, proposes a type-based measure of productivity that employs the deleted estimation method [Jelinek & Mercer, 1985] in defining unseen words of a corpus and expresses productivity by the ratio of unseen word types to all word types. The proposed type-based measure yields the productivity ranking “-men, -hua, -r, -zi, -tou,” where -men is the most productive and -tou is the least productive. The effects of corpus-data variability on a productivity measure are also examined. The proposed measure is found to obtain a consistent productivity ranking despite variability in corpus data.