The Emergence of Productive Non-Medical -itis: Corpus Evidence and Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

No natural language has a closed vocabulary (Kornai 2002). In addition to mechanisms to add to the base vocabulary, like borrowing, shortening, creativity etc. the productivity of morphological processes can form new complex entries. Some word formation processes can be used to form new words more easily than others. This fact, called morphological productivity, has been recognized for a long time and discussed from many points of view (see for example Aronoff 1976; Booij 1977; Baayen and Lieber 1991; Baayen 1992; Plag 1999; Bauer 2001; Baayen 2001; Nishimoto 2004). This paper is concerned with evidence for different aspects of morphological productivity. Our claim is that the problem of productivity can only be understood when different kinds of evidence – quantitative and qualitative – are combined. We will try to understand more about the interaction of qualitative and quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. We illustrate our claim by looking at a morphological element that has not received much attention in morphological descriptions yet: German -itis.1