Introduction

Summarising the earlier discussion, we can isolate a number of views to be found in the literature on scalar productivity.

1. There is no such thing. A morphological process is either productive or not productive.

2. Productivity is scalar, and this is an important fact about productivity. Somehow this variability is part of the linguistic competence of speakers.

3. Productivity is scalar, but this is a direct result of variable constraints that are imposed on morphological processes: the more constraints there are, the less productive the process.

4. Productivity is scalar, but this is nothing to do with linguistic competence, it is purely a matter of performance and should not be seen as an important feature of morphological productivity.

5. Productivity is scalar, and this is partly a result of morphological constraints on the processes, and partly a matter of linguistic performance. (This is a mixture of positions c and d.)

6. Productivity is not scalar. All morphological processes are productive, some are not widely used because their products are not needed often, but this is nothing to do with morphology.