New ways of investigating morphological productivity

The potential of a word-formation pattern to be exploited in the creation of new words is seen to be one of the defining characteristics of morphological productivity. However, most measures of morphological productivity as applied in recent studies deal with words attested in dictionaries and corpora and thus per definitionem with actual words. The present paper shows different approaches to the investigation of morphological productivity by presenting results from two recent studies on the productivity of English word-formation patterns in which the aspect of potentiality of word-formation was tested. These include a coinage test via an online survey and the exploitation of the World Wide Web to test the ratio of potential versus actual new creations. Although both studies presented therefore largely deal with expressive morphology and so-called creative coinages, which are frequently believed to be irrelevant for the investigation of morphological productivity, this contribution illustrates that such formations are decisive in gaining a deeper understanding of the multi-layered and complex phenomenon of morphological productivity.