Topics: Hocket’s Design Features - Linguistics
Productivity is one of Hocket’s design features. Productivity is the ability of language-users to formulate and understand infinite new utterances.
Indeed, even when the set of meaningful units (morphemes, word) in a given language is finite, an infinite set of utterances (like sentences) can be made from them. That is, languages are open systems. See also Duality of Patterning.
Productivity is one of the reasons why language is ever-changing.