Video Recordings

Though the term of productivity in word-formation seems to be intuitively clear and the idea (under various terms) has been present in linguistics for centuries, there are many approaches to productivity in contemporary linguistics, which differ in several aspects. In the talk, I briefly sketch selected issues of the study of productivity focusing on the last two or three decades, during which productivity has become one of the central topics of the research into word-formation. In this context, I refer to the main ideas of the work on productivity by Milos Dokulil, whose word-formation theory has become a widely respected and, in fact, the only common ground of word-formation descriptions in Czech linguistics. I focus on his opposition of the so-called systemic and empirical productivity and present some suggestions on how Dokulil’s ideas could be applied to the current, corpus-based research in productivity, by analyzing the productivity of four suffixes which are used to derive names of qualities in Czech (-ost, -stvi/-ctvi, -ismus and -ita). The talk will be given in Czech.