The Study of the Productivity of Compound Noun Maker Patterns in Persian Language

The present research investigates the productivity of compound noun maker patterns in Persian language based on the theoretical framework of Plag (2003). For this purpose, the authors have extracted 1300 compound nouns from a corpus taken from Persian language database (PLDB). The method of the present research is descriptive-analytic and data collecting is corpus based. After the study of collected data of research, the authors have concluded that the only quantitative method for measuring the productivity of word formation processes introduced by Plag (2003) is to count the outputs of a word formation process. Also, the most productive compound noun maker pattern among compound noun maker patterns is (noun+noun). Moreover, different methods of measuring the productivity rate of compound noun maker patterns offer different results. Analysis of the extracted data from the research corpus shows that among the compound noun maker patterns in Persian, (noun + noun) pattern has the highest productivity and these patterns ( pronoun + noun / pronoun + stem of present verb / noun + imperative verb / number + number) have the lowest productivity.