Productivity and Portuguese morphology
How experiments enable hypothesis-testing
This paper examines to what extent, as evidenced by productivity studies, just as the robustness and learnability of phonological patterns may be grounded and biased by naturalness considerations, so may morphology. Four case studies (L-morphomes, competing nominalizing affixes, athematic participles, and defective verbs), that are carried out with experimental tasks using wug-words, jointly demonstrate that choices in the realization of morphological categories may depend on submorphemic (features) and supramorphemic (phrasal syntax) principles, and show that both morphology-internal and interface considerations may modulate the extent of productivity of generalizations.
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