Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Competition in Derivation: What Can We Learn from French Doublets in -age and -ment?

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation

Part of the book series: Studies in Morphology ((SUMO,volume 5))

Abstract

The article gives a precise definition of the notion of doublet and applies it to French nominalizations in -age and -ment. The dimensions of competition that play a role in the case of doublets are then discussed and it is shown that they lead us to distinguish lexemes from lexical entries, the latter possibly subsuming the former. Among these dimensions, the type of the construction headed by the base verb is the crucial one since it determines the meaning associated with the derivational series a derived item belongs to. Réchauffage ‘(re)heating’ has an agentive meaning because the verbal lexeme it is correlated with heads an agentive construction, whereas réchauffement ‘warming’ has not because it is correlated with a verbal lexeme denoting an internally caused event. The challenge raised by the French doublets in question is that many of them have exactly the same meaning in some contexts, and therefore compete, and a different meaning in others. A hypothesis is proposed to respond to this challenge (the Repartition Hypothesis) but the readers are provided with a lot of examples showing that even when nominalizations in -age and -ment share the same meanings, they do not take exactly the same set of complements.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The Leipzig glossing rules are use throughout. I would like to thank Anna Maria Thornton and Franz Rainer for helpful comments and insightful remarks.

  2. 2.

    This problem occurs whenever /ris/ is suffixed on a verbal stem ending with a [+alveolar, +fricative] consonant e.g. asperger ‘to splash’ aspers-eur/*aspers-rice, expulser ‘to expel’ expuls-eur/*expuls-rice, diviser ‘to divide’ divis-eur/*divis-rice, etc. (compare with examples (6)). A similar problem arises in Italian (Thornton 2012c).

  3. 3.

    Syntactic structures are printed in sans serif fonts.

  4. 4.

    Overabundance does not imply that the verb it affects belongs to a different inflectional type. Its inflection simply exhibits variation. Generally some of the forms are more frequent than the others (Thornton 2012a).

  5. 5.

    Bonami and Crysmann (2018) integrates ‘Paradigm Identifiers’ into an Information-based Morphology framework and proposes a more general and elaborate account of flexemes.

  6. 6.

    The lexicon is not a list but a hierarchically organized network (Koenig 1999; Elman 2004) and includes lexical information not tied to any particular lexeme, for instance the fact that all nouns ending in a consonant and denoting a male being in Russian belong to type 1 declension (Corbett 1991).

  7. 7.

    Baayen (2014) argues that experimental data go against the still prevailing model of the ‘static dictionary metaphor’ in experimental and psycholinguistic research.

  8. 8.

    In Generative Grammar, lexical entries are generally considered as equivalent to lexemes without discussion (Reinhart 2002). The issue of lexeme is addressed in Acquaviva (2008), however.

  9. 9.

    Lexical entries so conceived correspond to what Mel’čuk (1984–1992) calls ‘lexies’.

  10. 10.

    For computation based on the noun complement cf. Varvara and Zamparelli (2019).

  11. 11.

    This echoes what Ernst (2016) has put to light about adverb modification: the more dimensions a verb has, the easier the modification.

  12. 12.

    Criteria allowing to distinguish eventive nouns from other types of nouns are discussed in Godard and Jayez (1995) and Huyghe (2011).

  13. 13.

    No attestation of le tronçonnage des ((cortèges—parcelles—actes de reproduction)—de la théologie), or of le tronçonnement de la pierre in Google (accessed 10.2016).

  14. 14.

    This adjective has not necessarily a metaphorical meaning, as shown by (salle—chambre—voie) encavée ‘((bed)room—road) nested in a low position’, Le grand lac Manitou (…) est encavé entre des montagnes énormes ‘The big Manitou lake is nested between huge mountains’ (Web). If we rely on Web examples, it appears to be widely used in Québec.

References

  • Ackerman, Farrell, Robert Malouf, and James P. Blevins. 2016. Patterns and Discriminability in Language Analysis. Word Structure 9(2): 132–155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Acquaviva, Paolo. 2008. Lexical Plurals. A Morphosemantic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aronoff, Mark, and Mark Lindsay. 2014. Partial Organization in Languages: La langue est un système où la plupart se tient. In Proceedings of the Décembrettes 8th, 6–7 Dec 2012, ed. Sandra Augendre et al., 9–22. Toulouse: CNRS & Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baayen, Harald. 2014. Experimental and Psycholinguistic Approaches. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, ed. Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer, 95–117. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baroni, Marco, Raffaela Bernardi, and Roberto Zamparelli. 2013. Frege in Space: A Program of Compositional Distributional Semantics. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology 9: 5–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boas, Hans (ed). 2010. Contrastive Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonami, Olivier, and Gilles Boyé. 2005. Construire le paradigme d’un adjectif. Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 34: 77–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bonami, Olivier, and Berthold Crysmann. 2018. Lexeme and Flexeme in a Formal Theory of Grammar. In The Lexeme in Descriptive and Theoretical Morphology, ed. Olivier Bonami, Gilles Boyé, Georgette Dal, Hélène Giraudo, and Fiammetta Namer, 203–235. Berlin: Language Science Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonami, Olivier, and Delphine Tribout. 2012. Underspecification and the Semantics of Lexeme Formation. In 15th International Morphology Meeting. Wirtschäftsuniversität Wien, Wien.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bonami, Olivier, Gilles Boyé, and Françoise Kerleroux. 2009. L’allomorphie radicale et la relation flexion-construction. In Aperçus de morphologie française, ed. Bernard Fradin, Françoise Kerleroux, and Marc Plénat, 103–125. Saint-Denis: PUV.

    Google Scholar 

  • Booij, Geert. 2002. The Morphology of Dutch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. Canonical Derivational Morphology. Word Structure 3: 141–155.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dal, Georgette, and Fiammetta Namer. 2010. French Property Nouns Toponyms or Ethnic Adjectives: A Case of Base Variation. In Variation and Change in Morphology, ed. Franz Rainer, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Dieter Kastovsky, and Hans Christian Luschützky, 53–73. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Davidson, Donald. 1967. The Logical Form of Action Sentences. In The Logic of Decision and Action, ed. Nicolas Rescher, 81–120. Hertford: University of Pittsburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Anthony R. 2001. Linking by Types in the Hierarchical Lexicon. Stanford: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dowty, David R. 1989. On the Semantic Content of the Notion of ‘Thematic Role’. In Properties, Types and Meaning, vol. 1, ed. Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee, and Raymond Turner, 69–129. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Elman, Jeffrey L. 2004. An Alternative View on the Mental Lexicon. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(7): 301–306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ernst, Thomas. 2016. Modification of Stative Predicates. Language 92(2): 237–274.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fábregas, Antonio, and Rafael Marín. 2012. The Role of Aktionsart in Deverbal Nouns: State Nominalizations Across Languages. Journal of Linguistics 48: 35–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fradin, Bernard. 2012. Les nominalisations et la lecture ‘moyen’. Lexique 20: 129–156.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fradin, Bernard, and Françoise Kerleroux. 2003. Troubles with Lexemes. In Topics in Morphology. Selected Papers from the Third Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, Barcelona, 20–22 Sept 2001, ed. Geert Booij, Janet De Cesaris, Sergio Scalise, and Angela Ralli, 177–196. Barcelona: IULA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. L’identité lexémique. In Aperçus de morphologie du français, ed. Bernard Fradin, Françoise Kerleroux, and Marc Plénat, 85–104. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gärdenfors, Peter. 2014. The Geometry of Meaning. Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Godard, Danièle, and Jacques Jayez. 1995. Types Nominaux et Anaphores: Le cas des objets et des événements. Cahiers Chronos, 41–58.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the Typology of Inchoative/Causative Verb Alternations. In Causatives and Transitivity, ed. Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky, 87–111. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hathout, Nabil. 2011. Une approche topologique de la construction des mots: Propositions théoriques et application à la préfixation en anti-. In Des unités morphologiques au lexique, ed. Michel Roché, Gilles Boyé, Nabil Hathout, Stéphanie Lignon, and Marc Plénat, 251–318. Paris: Hermès/Lavoisier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heinold, Simone Beatrice. 2011. Verbal Properties of Deverbal Nominals. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hohenhaus, Peter. 2005. Lexicalization and Institutionalization. In Handbook of Word-Formation, ed. Pavol Štekauer, and Rochelle Lieber, 353–373. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Huyghe, Richard. 2011. Noms d’objets et noms d’événements: Quelles frontières linguistiques? Scolia 26: 81–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huyghe, Richard, and Rafael Marín. 2007. L’héritage aspectuel des noms déverbaux en français et en espagnol. Faits de langue 30: 265–273.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive. Language 72: 533–578.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kay, Paul, and Charles J. Fillmore. 1999. Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic Generalization: The What’s X doing? Construction. Language 75(1): 1–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kelling, Carmen. 2003. The Role of Agentivity for Suffix Selection. In Topics in Morphology. Selected Papers from MMM3, Barcelona, Sept 2001, ed. Geert Booj et al., 197–210. Barcelona: IULA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koenig, Jean-Pierre. 1999. Lexical Relations. Stanford: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Landman, Fred. 2000. Events and Plurality. The Jerusalem Lectures. Studies in Linguistics & Philosophy, vol. 76. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Theoretical Prerequisites, vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lenci, Alessandro. 2008. Distributional Semantics in Linguistic and Cognitive Research. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di linguistica 20(1): 1–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Fabienne. 2008. The Semantics of Eventive Suffixes in French. In Incremental Specification in Context, Working Papers of the SFB 732, vol. 1, ed. Florian Schäffer, 145–171. Stuttgart: Stuttgart University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mel’čuk, Igor A. (ed). 1984–1992. Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire du français contemporain. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1994. Cours de morphologie générale. Deuxième partie: Significations morphologiques, vol. 2. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal – CNRS Editions.

    Google Scholar 

  • Onnis, Luca, Thomas A. Farmer, Marco Baroni, Morten H. Christiansen, and Michael J. Spivey. 2008. Generalizable Distributional Regularities Aid Fluent Language Processing: The Case of Semantic Valence Tendencies. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di linguistica 20(1): 129–156.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parsons, Terence. 1994. Events in the Semantics of English: A Study in Subatomic Semantics. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plag, Ingo. 1998. The Polysemy of -ize Derivatives. In Yearbook of Morphology 1997, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 219–242. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Plénat, Marc, and Michel Roché. 2003. Prosodic Constraints on Suffixation in French. In Topics in Morphology. Selected Papers from the Third MMM, Barcelona, 20–22 Sept 2001, ed. Geert Booij et al, 285–299. Barcelona: IULA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. La suffixation dénominale en -at et la loi des (sous-)séries. In Foisonnements Morphologiques. Etudes en hommage à Françoise Kerleroux, ed. Florence Villoing, Sophie David, and Sarah Leroy, 47–74. Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rainer, Franz. 2014. Polysemy in Derivation. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, ed. Rochelle Lieber, and Pavol Štekauer, 338–353. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reinhart, Tanya. 2002. The Theta System – An Overview. Theoretical Linguistics 28(3): 229–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roché, Michel. 1997. Briard, Bougeoir et Camionneur: Dérivés aberrants, dérivés possibles. In Mots Possibles et Mots Existants, ed. Danielle Corbin, et al, 241–250. Villeneuve d’Ascq: URA 382 – CNRS & Université de Lille 3.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roché, Michel, and Marc Plénat. 2014. Le jeu des contraintes dans la sélection du thème présuffixal. In Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, Berlin, 19–23 Juillet 2014, ed. Frank Neveu, Peter Blumenthal, Linda Hriba, Annetta Gerstenberg, Judith Meinschaefer, and Sophie Prévost. Paris: ILF/EDP Science.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rothstein, Susan. 2007. Telicity, Atomicity and the Vendler Classification of Verbs. In Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect, ed. Susan Rothstein, 43–77. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rumshinsky, Anna. 2008. Resolving Polysemy in Verbs: Contextualized Distributional Approach to Argument Semantics. Rivista di linguistica/Italian Journal of Linguistics 20(1): 215–240.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thornton, Anna M. 2012a. La sovrabbondanza nei paradigmi verbali dell’italiano contemporaneo. In La variazione nell’italiano e nella sua storia, ed. Patricia Bianchi, Nicola De Blasi, Chiara De Caprio, and Francesco Montuori, 457–468. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012b. Overabundance in Italian Verb Morphology and Its Interactions with Other Non-canonical Phenomena. In Irregularity in Morphology (and beyond), ed. Thomas Stolz, Hitomi Otsuka, Ania Urdze, and Johan van der Auwera, 251–269. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012c. Quando parlare delle donne è un problema. In Per Tullio di Mauro, ed. Anna M. Thornton and Miriam Voghera, 301–316. Roma: Aracne.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012d. Reduction and Maintenance of Overabundance. A Case Study on Italian Verb Paradigms. Word Structure 5(2): 183–207.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tribout, Delphine. 2010. Les conversions de nom à verbe et de verbe à nom en français. Ph.D. thesis, DRL-Université Paris Diderot, Paris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Varvara, Rossella, and Roberto Zamparelli. 2019. Competition Between Event-Denoting Deverbal Nouns and Nominal Infinitives in Italian. In Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation, ed. Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Wolfgang U. Dressler, and Hans Christian Luschützky, 95–121. Cham: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Paris Diderot University, Paris, France

    Bernard Fradin

Authors
  1. Bernard Fradin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bernard Fradin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Romance Languages, WU Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Franz Rainer

  2. Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Francesco Gardani

  3. Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Wolfgang U. Dressler

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Hans Christian Luschützky

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Fradin, B. (2019). Competition in Derivation: What Can We Learn from French Doublets in -age and -ment?. In: Rainer, F., Gardani, F., Dressler, W., Luschützky, H. (eds) Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation . Studies in Morphology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02549-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02550-2

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation