Relative productivity of word formation schemes in Mexican Spanish. Update 2022

Abstract

This paper presents statistics on the productivity of lexical morphology in Mexican Spanish. The data were obtained from the Morfolex neologism database, and the calculations were carried out with the accumulated neologisms to June 2022, which amounted to 21,605 words. Counts of types, frequency of occurrence, and hápax legomena were calculated from the corpus of neologisms for each word formation scheme contained in it. These calculations followed the methodology used in Morfolex since 2010 and detailed in a previous work (Zacarías Ponce de León, 2016), which reported the findings corresponding to ten thousand neologisms. The update presented here confirms that the Morfolex database is representative of the Mexican lexicon and presents an overview of the most productive word-formation processes in this variety of Spanish. At the end of the work, a comparison is made between the current data and those corresponding to 2016 to explore the evolution of different lexical schemes.