Exercise 4.5

Some affixes are more productive than others, and tend to be the ones that are used in creating new words. It would be most likely to find -ness or -hood being used to make nouns from these novel adjectives. So for stummy you would probably get stumminess, for blide you might get blidehood. Notice though that the meanings of -ness and -hood differ, and so the choice of affix may depend on what you think the adjective could have as a likely meaning. Note also that some of the novel adjectives in this list are similar to existing adjectives that have less regular noun forms, such as wide-width and long-length. So for blide you might get blidth, by analogy, though this is not very likely. In other words, productivity is a key factor in deriving new words.