Making “sense” of the interdependence of polysemy and productivity: A case study of English PHOB

Previous research has strongly indicated that morphologically productive forms/processes have multiple senses. However, this phenomenon has only been examined qualitatively and somewhat cursorily, although such research suggests that semantic processes may affect the productivity of a form/process (e.g., Bauer 2001 ; Charvátová 2013 ). The present study aims to address this gap by conducting a diachronic analysis of polysemous English PHOB to explore how its multiple senses may impact its productivity over time. PHOB is a particularly interesting case because it appears to be productive and has multiple distinct meanings: a fear of something (e.g., arachnophobia), a strong bias against some group of people (e.g., homophobia), or a repulsive property of physical materials (e.g., oleophobic). A diachronic corpus of American English was used to identify instances of PHOB, and each was coded for its sense. Two productivity measures were calculated (category-conditioned productivity and hapax-conditioned productivity) for the form overall as well as for each sense across six decades. The results indicate that multiple processes are involved in shifts in the meaning and productivity of PHOB. They also indicate that senses of PHOB appear to affect each other as well as affecting its overall productivity. For instance, the rise in the productivity of the ‘intolerance’ sense of PHOB starting in the 1970s appears to directly increase the level of ambiguity between ‘intolerance’ and ‘fear’ meanings as well as (temporarily) decreasing the productivity of ‘fear’ in the next decade. These results demonstrate the importance of semantic processes in explaining morphological productivity and provide evidence that future productivity research should consider polysemy more closely as an explanatory variable.