ON THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE CHINESE SUFFIXES −兒 −R, −化 −HUÀ AND −頭 −TOU

論漢語「－兒」、「－化」與「－頭」詞綴的能產性

能產性作為形態學的基本概念之一，其定義引起了不少爭論，學者們測量能產性的方法和項目也不盡相同。本文基於中央研究院的「近代漢語標記語料庫」與「現代漢語平衡語料庫」，採用Baayen的P指數來測量漢語中「−兒」、「−化」與「−頭」三個詞綴的共時與歷時能產性，並將其結果與Nishimoto （2003） 的結論進行比較。研究結果表明，運用不同時代的語料來測量某一詞綴的歷時能產性，可以視為非常有效的研究方法。

The notion of ‘productivity’ is an essential one in the study of linguistic morphology, but its definition is indeed challenging, and there are different ways to measure different aspects of the productivity of a morphological process. In this paper we shall adopt Baayen’s P measure of productivity for a corpus-based study of the productivity of three Mandarin derivational suffixes, namely the nominalizer/diminutive −兒 −r, −化 −huà ‘−ise, −ify’ and −頭 −tou, a ‘dummy’ nominal suffix (Lin 2001:82), in order to assess how this index relates to our received knowledge about the productivity of such forms, and, also, to compare our results with a previous study by Nishimoto (2003) on a small corpus of Modern Chinese. Moreover, in a diachronic perspective, we shall compare data from the Academia Sinica Tagged Corpus of Early Mandarin Chinese and from the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. We shall show that our P values mostly reflect what descriptive works tell us about the productivity of the affixes considered here in two different periods of the history of the language; when corpus data for previous stages of a language are available, they appear as a better basis for assessments on the profitability of a morphological process than dictionary data.