288 Chapter 16 Morphology: words and lexemes
Productive affixes have different degrees of productivity - they have differing
ranges of bases they can attach to. Among suffixes forming nouns, for example,
·ness is highly productive, ·ity somewhat less so, while ·dom is of very low produc
tivity (though it is productive nevertheless, as evident from such a recent coinage as
yuppiedom).
At the highest degree of productivity it is unnecessary, and indeed not feasible, to
list in the dictionary all the words formed by the process in question. For example,
·like can be added very freely indeed to nouns to form such compound adjectives as
catlike, doglike, mouse like, wolflike, apple-like, banana-like, pear-like, and it would
be a mistake to try and include all words of this kind in the dictionary.
Words which couldn't be formed with their present meaning by means of opera
tions still productive in the grammar today are said to be lexicalised: they
absolutely have to be included in a dictionary. These include words formed through
processes in the past that have not given rise to productive operations in the lan
guage as it is now, such as drunkard, bondage, and so on, because merely from hav
ing seen drunk and bond and ·ard and ·age we can't figure out what words can be
made from them (bondard, drunkage?) or what they would mean. But lexicali
sation covers other cases too, notably:
Words like durable, knowledgeable, perishable: although ·able suffixation is a
highly productive operation, what's productive is its use on transitive verb bases,
not bound bases (dur·), nouns (knowledge), or intransitive verbs (perish).
Some words have meanings not predictable from the combination of their com
ponent parts. The meanings have to be specified individually. For example, the
salient meaning of considerable doesn't match that of numerous words like
achievable ("can be achieved") or climbable ("can be climbed"): it doesn't mean
"can be considered", but "large, significant, or notable". Similarly, the compound
loudmouth mentioned in §7.2 doesn't mean "mouth which is loud", but "person
who talks a lot, typically one who gives offence". And gentleman doesn't mean
"gentle man", but "man of chivalrous manner and good breeding or high social
position" - or it may be just a courteous variant of man.
Information about words like this must appear in the dictionary, because no matter
how well you are acquainted with the general principles of lexical morphology, you
can't figure out what you need to know about them. In general, the grammar of a
language can only cover the rule-governed aspects of its ways of structuring words
or sentences. To complete the description we also need a dictionary, to list the
unpredictable parts.