Derivational Morphology and Word Formation: Functional Directions in Contemporary English and Azerbaijani

This article develops a function-driven, corpus-based account of derivational morphology restricted to English and Azerbaijani, two typologically distant systems that nonetheless converge under shared discourse pressures. We conceptualize word-formation as the coupling of morphotactic resources with communicative goals and operationalize productivity through a transparent index averaging normalized type frequency, novel-token ratio, and mean transparency. Using balanced written corpora spanning academic prose, administrative/professional documentation, and quality media, we extract derivatives by rule-guided filtering and manual verification, and annotate process (affixation, compounding, conversion, blending), semantic role (agentive, instrumental, evaluative, procedural), register, and transparency; inter-annotator reliability targets are met following joint training and adjudication. Results reveal complementary profiles: English favors conversion, agentive -er, and evaluative/adjectival -able, while blending clusters in media; Azerbaijani exhibits high-yield agentive and instrumental suffixation (-çı/-çi, -lıq/-lik), productive nominalizations (-ma/-mə, -etmə), and transparent NN compounds in professional discourse. Register-conditioned Functional Pathways—innovation, professionalization, evaluation, proceduralizing—predict the loci of stabilization for novel formations, and statistical tests (rank-based or parametric, with effect sizes and multiple-comparison control) substantiate cross-register contrasts without a necessary trade-off between productivity and transparency in the agglutinative system. The study refines English–Azerbaijani typological expectations, provides a replicable analytic workflow for higher-education settings, and offers practical guidance for terminology and role labeling in bilingual professional communication.