ABSTRACT
Miller (1996) coined the term “connectingness” to describe a property of words-that they facilitate the connecting of ideasand to illustrate the productivity of derivational morphology. Productivity is one of the most remarkable properties of language: a relatively small number of familiar elements can be recombined in flexible ways to express a virtually limitless range of ideas. Although connectingness is not a legitimate word in the sense of being listed in dictionaries, it is comprehensible to English speakers because it is constructed from the familiar morphemes, connect, -ing, and -ness. The latter two are “bound” morphemes because they cannot stand alone, but both bound morphemes and free morphemes-like connect-have semantic associations so that the meaning of connectingness can be inferred by combining the meanings of its morphemic constituents. Plausibility alone suggests that the approximately 80,000-word vocabulary acquired by the average high school graduate could not have been learned one word at a time (Miller & Gildea, 1987). It has been estimated that 60% of new words acquired by school-age children are morphemically complex but semantically transparent, such that the meaning of the parts allows an accurate guess at the meaning of the whole word (e.g., knowing dog and house should lead to a good guess at the meaning of doghouse) (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Further, for every word a child learns, another one to three related words are comprehensible depending on the child’s ability to use context and morphology to induce meaning (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; White, Power, & White, 1989).
