Productive vs Generative - What's the difference?
productive | generative |
capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile
yielding good or useful results; constructive
of, or relating to the creation of goods or services
(linguistics, of an affix or word construction rule) consistently applicable to any of an open set of words
*
(medicine) of a cough, producing mucus or sputum from the respiratory tract
(medicine) of inflammation, producing new tissue
Having the power of generating, propagating, originating, or producing.
* That generative particle. — Bentley
*
As adjectives the difference between productive and generative
is that productive is capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile while generative is having the power of generating, propagating, originating, or producing.productive
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Moreover, this relationship is a productive one, in the sense that when new Adjectives are created (e.g. ginormous'' concocted out of ''gigantic'' and ''enormous''), then the corresponding Adverb form (in this case ''ginormously'') can also be used. And in those exceptional cases where Adverbs do not end in ''-ly'', they generally have the same form as the corresponding Adjective, as with ''hard'', ''fast , etc.
Usage notes
In English, the plural suffix “-es” is productive' because it can be appended to an open set of words (singular nouns ending in sibilants). Thus, if a new word with that pattern becomes an English noun (e.g. *''examplex''), it would have a default plural (e.g. *''examplexes'') because “-es” is ' productive .Synonyms
* See alsoAntonyms
* unproductive * nonproductive * destructive * baneful * ruinousReferences
* * ----generative
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Of course, structures like those associated with (36) and (37) constitute only a tiny subset of the infinite set of well-formed sentence structures found in English. We can increase the Generative Capacity of our grammar ( = the set of structures which it generates) either by expanding the Lexicon on the one hand, or by expanding the Categorial Rules (i.e. Phrase Structure Rules) on the other.