Productivity and Onomasiological Coercion

Abstract

Jackendoff’s understanding of morphological productivity is close to Schultink’s definition, which relies on unintentionality, and to Corbin’s notion of regularity. Jackendoff’s view emphasizes processing efficiency as a driving force. In Corbin’s analysis, regularity is subordinate to availability. This is more in line with the perspective of word formation as a device for generating names for new concepts. In this perspective, the meaning of the resulting word is determined by the concept to be named rather than by the word formation rule or the input words. This is called onomasiological coercion. In this respect, word formation rules are different from words and syntactic rules. Therefore, it is worth making word formation into a separate component, operating on the lexicon.