Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Productive
In linguistics, a rule that native speakers use to produce new utterances is called productive.
In standard English, the plural -en is no longer productive, for instance. It is used for the plural of ox, oxen, but not for new words ending with -ks. In the hacker sociolect, however, the plural -en is productive, as is illustrated by the plurals boxen, unixen and emacsen, for example. In a similar manner, English strong verbs, which use ablaut to indicated tense, are no longer productive. All new English verbs are weak verbs.
Productive also means positive or beneficial, and formative and constitutive.
10-26-2009 08:16:03
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The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details