| Morphological productivity is one of the key issues in the study of derivational morphology, referring to the property of an affix or morphological process to give rise to new formations on a systematic basis. This paper aims at making a survey of past as well as potential productivity of five commonly-used negative prefixes in English (a-,dis-, in-,un-,non-) and then make a detailed comparison and analysis of them, taking Baayen's quantitative measure of calculating productivity as its theoretical basis. All the linguistic data were extracted from BNC by using SARA software, then manual work was required to weed out irrelevant data. SPSS software and office software (Excel) are adopted in the calculation of data statistics. The findings shows that the most productive ones among the five in the past are un- and non-,for they produce far more words compared with the other three, then followed by in-,dis- and a-.The five prefixes chiefly combines with adjectives and nouns to form negatives. Apart from adjectives and nouns attached, un- and dis- also combine with a third word class-verbs. Analysis was made to find out which one of them would be used most often in the new word formation to produce negatives in future (that is, potential productivity) and the results suggest some inconsistency with the anticipated assumption. The results show: (1) Broadly speaking, non- is the most productive one, followed by un-,a-,in-,dis-. (2)Specifically speaking, a) when used with adjectives, non- is the most productive one, then is a-, and then followed by un-, dis-,in-.b) when used with nouns, the most productive one is non-,then followed by un-, a-,in-dis-.c)when used with verbs (only un- and dis-),the productivity of un- is far more bigger than dis-,that is, in future, there could be more verbs that use un- prefix to form its negatives compared with that of dis-.
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