Re: OT: English and schizophrenia

On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> John Cowan wrote:
> > Pinker (in _Words and Rules_) claims that only -s is productive;
> > in tests of both German-sounding and foreign-sounding nonsense nouns,
> > most German-speakers are comfortable only with -s endings.
>
> Perhaps, but somehow I find what Pinker says unbelievable.
I'm also surprised and a bit suspicious of this result, but I guess I
would have to look at the evidence.

 I mean,
> don't agentives like "der Spieler", "der Führer", etc predictably take
> the null plural morpheme? I know that's not the measure of productivity,
> but it jars with my sense of the language.  (I am of course not a native
> speaker.)
The problem is, something that is "unproductive" can show up more often
than other things that are "productive".  For one thing, "unproductive"
doesn't mean that it doesn't get used with new words, only that it doesn't
get used to a large enough degree. For intance, the English suffix -ity is
unproductive, since it can only be attached to two or three morpheme
nowadays. One of these morphemes is -able, one of the language's more
productive suffixes. So the unproductive morpheme -ity shows up in lots of
novel words by strapping itself to a productive suffix.

This is precisely what could be happening in the cases you bring like
"der Spieler".

Marcus