A Corpus-based Study of the Productivity of Derivational Affixes in Persian

One of the most important aspects of word-formation is considered as productivity which is a continuum concept in morphology (Bauer, 1996, and Baayen, 2009). Booij (2007) says that the frequent process in word formation is derivation. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, only a partial number of Persian derivational affixes have been investigated in previous studies so far. In this regard, the following corpus-based study is done to discuss more affixes of Persian language and to reach more comprehensive results. The current study tries to answer the following two questions: 1. What are the most and the least frequent affixes in Persian language? 2. Is there any relation between productivity and word meaning prediction? To fulfill the aims of the research, 166 affixes, consisting of 28 prefixes, 72 postfixes and 66 affixoids were collected by a python code which searches through the Monitor corpus. In this study, Baayen measurement (P*) was used to measure the productivity. Results of the study showed that the theory of Bauer (2004) about productivity and predictability of words is true in most cases but with few exceptions.