[1][2] In the book's introduction, Bauer raises several questions which are examined in subsequent chapters.

These questions are about the distinction between "productivity" and "creativity" (commonly understood as word-formation via, respectively, unconscious or semiconscious application of rules, and deliberate coining), the possibility of developing measures for productivity, the relationship between productivity and frequency or semantic coherence, and the causal relationship between unproductive processes and ungrammaticality.

In the next chapter, Bauer provides a historical overview of studies on productivity and examines such issues as whether productivity is an either/or matter or gradated, and the concepts of restricted and semi-productivity.

In chapter 5 he examines the role of corpora in studying and determining the productivity of morphological processes, and in chapter 6 he surveys the development and varying productivity of a number of historical and cross-language morphological phenomena.

[3] This article about a book on language, linguistics or translation is a stub.