K otázce produktivity (nejen) verbonominálních kompozit v italštině

The article offers a brief survey of the main methods used nowadays to capture the productivity of morphological processes. The discussion starts out from the definition of productivity put forward by Corbin (1987). According to the accepted distinction between availability and profitability, the qualitative and the quantitative approaches are presented. Special attention is paid to two methods typical of the quantitative approach: dictionary-based and corpus-based. Italian verb-noun compounds (such as portalettere, guardaboschi etc.) are used as an example to show how the profitability of the process can be captured in a dictionary and in a corpus. The corpus-based study of productivity is demonstrated by Baayen’s work (e.g. Baayen, 1992, 2001, 2008). It exemplifies his view according to which profitability can be conceived of as the likelihood of observing a new type when sampling a large corpus. The article introduces key notions such as vocabulary growth curve / rate and concludes with a brief discussion of some problems associated with the corpus-based approach, namely the question of the supposed equivalence of hapaxes / neologisms and the problem of type identification and elimination.