Three types of suffixes in French

Author： Don Jan Sleeman Petra Westveer Thom

Publisher： John Benjamins Publishing Company

E-ISSN： 1569-9919|32|1|33-47

ISSN： 0929-7332

Source： Linguistics in the Netherlands, Vol.32, Iss.1, 2015-01, pp. : 33-47

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

Traditionally a two-way distinction is made in French between learned and non-learned suffixes, based on etymology. However, this distinction does not account for all suffixes. Furthermore, suffixes are traditionally considered as categorial heads, but some suffixes derive words of multiple categories. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of French suffixes, distinguishing three instead of two types, using a theory by Creemers et al. (2015) proposed for Dutch. In their analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology, Creemers et al. distinguish three instead of two types of suffixes, proposing an alternative to Lowenstamm (2010). Starting from their proposal, we show that it is possible to distinguish three types of suffixes in French as well, accounting for the categorial flexibility of some suffixes, without resorting to the vague distinction between learned and non-learned.