Productivity of Assamese derivational suffixes

Abstract

Numerous languages, especially Indo-European, have made major strides in the study of morphological productivity as a result of the advent of digital technologies in recent decades. However, Indo-Aryan languages have received comparatively little attention from a quantitative perspective, primarily due to the lack of sufficient digital corpora and resources. This research attempts to investigate the productivity status of a few Assamese suffixes, addressing the challenges of obtaining resources and data collection techniques due to the lack of fully developed, substantial digital corpora. The study employs two manually curated samples, derived from digital texts and a dictionary of the language, to investigate this issue. While some of the suffixes exhibit consistency of productivity across various measuring methods in both samples, other suffixes present a contrastive picture indicating gaps and non-alignment between measuring methods and sampling approaches. It determines the overall productivity of suffixes using different measurement methods and shows that shifting the focus to various elements or functions of the suffixes may reveal fluctuations in their productivity.