1038: Productivity Oct 12, 2017

Affixes all attach themselves to individual words, but some have the ability to be affixed to more than others. The term for this is 'productivity'. For instance, the suffixes '-ness', '-ity', and '-th' can all be added to adjectives in order to make nouns (with some variation in meaning), however, '-ness' can be added to far more adjectives than '-th' can'; indeed, sometimes, '-ness' even can replace '-th', though this is not possible the other way around. Therefore, it is said that '-ness' is more productive than '-th'. Also, certain affixes may have meaning for some words, but will not add additional meaning to others. 'In-', with some words, for example 'invoke', cannot be removed from the root, whereas with 'inbreed' it can be, so it is said that 'in-' is productive in certain circumstances, because it only produces new meanings that are separate from that of its root some of the time. Furthermore, for words begin with 'con-' or 'com-'—which are historically the same prefix that has been modified for phonological reasons— such as 'compute', 'convict' or 'convoke', the affix cannot be removed ever (i.e. there is no 'pute', 'vict', not 'voke') so it is said that 'con-' is non-productive.