Measuring and Comparing the Productivity of Mandarin Chinese Suffixes

Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2003, pp. 49-76 49  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Measuring and Comparing the Productivity of Mandarin Chinese Suffixes Eiji Nishimoto* 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. Keywords: Mandarin Chinese word formation, Mandarin Chinese suffixes, morphological productivity, corpus-based productivity measure. 1. Introduction 1.1 Morphological Productivity The focus of a study of morphological productivity is on derivational affixation that involves a base word and an affix [Aronoff, 1976], as seen in sharp + -ness → sharpness, electric + -ity * Ph.D. Program in Linguistics, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, U.S.A. e-mail: enishimoto@gc.cuny.edu 50 Eiji Nishimoto → electricity, child + -ish → childish.1 Native speakers of a language have intuitions about what are and are not acceptable words of their language, and if presented with non-existent, potential words [Aronoff, 1983], they accept certain word formations more readily than others [Anshen & Aronoff, 1981; Aronoff & Schvaneveldt, 1978; Cutler, 1980]. Most intriguing in the issue of productivity is that the degree of productivity varies among affixes, and many studies in the literature have been devoted to accounting for this particular aspect of productivity [see Bauer, 2001, and Plag, 1999, for an overview]. How the degree of productivity varies among affixes is best illustrated by the English nominal suffixes -ness and -ity, which are often considered “rivals” as they sometimes share a base word (e.g., clear → clearness or clarity). In general, -ness is felt to be more productive than -ity.2 The word formation of -ity is limited, for example, …

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