On the Limits of Productive Word Formation: Experimental

In some languages, such as Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, word formation can be said to be characteristically creative. In these languages, it is quite normal to create novel words by merging several suffixes after the stem. This process may be iterative, allowing recursive stacking of morphemes to the stem. Although it is well-known that in some languages word formation is in this way productive relative to other languages, there is little behavioral data concerning the limits of such productivity. We report an experimental investigation of the limits of word formation in Finnish and argue on the basis of our results that the word formation in Finnish is fully productive, even recursive, but it is counterbalanced by a strong complexity effect which restricts speakers’ ability to understand complex words.