Headedness in Exocentric Compounds and Morphological Productivity

This paper aims to find a connection between morphological productivity of a particular morpheme and its potential to serve as the head of exocentric compounds. This goal is achieved by investigating how a group of Sino-Korean compounds, called ca- compounds, is derived. Ca-compounds can be derived by combining ca ‘self’ and a head morpheme of a source compound. Though what is to be combined with ca ‘self’ undergoes competition with other candidate morphemes, no clear cue for the headedness such as semantic headedness is available due to the semantic identity between competing morphemes. It thus remains mysterious why a certain morpheme is to be chosen over the other(s). I hypothesize that in such cases, the past productivity of a particular morpheme, which can be calculated by its type frequency, offers a guidance for the choice of a particular morpheme for morphological processes. This hypothesis is tested by the way ca-compounds are formed out of an exocentric source compound.