Since Jean Berko Gleason’s famous 1958 study showing that English-speaking schoolchildren have learned to pluralize the made-up word wug with the suffix [z] (wugs), we have learned much about morphological productivity: how children and adults apply patterns in their language to create new inflected forms of words they haven’t seen before. This course will provide an introductory survey to the theory and practice of studying morphological productivity. Topics covered will include: experimental methodologies for testing productivity (nonce-word studies a.k.a. “wug tests”, artificial language experiments, acquisition studies), theories of productivity (e.g. phonological rules, analogical modelling, the Tolerance Principle), and what sorts of patterns speakers generalize to new forms (for example, cases of “surfeit of the stimulus”, where speakers show a bias towards phonologically natural patterns).

Level: introductory