摘要：In some languages, such as Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, word formation can be said
to be characteristically creative. In these languages, it is quite normal to create novel
words by merging several suffixes after the stem. This process may be iterative,
allowing recursive stacking of morphemes to the stem. Although it is well-known that
in some languages word formation is in this way productive relative to other languages,
there is little behavioral data concerning the limits of such productivity. We report an
experimental investigation of the limits of word formation in Finnish and argue on the
basis of our results that the word formation in Finnish is fully productive, even
recursive, but it is counterbalanced by a strong complexity effect which restricts
speakers!ˉ ability to understand complex words.
