Autore: Hénot-Mortier, Adèle
Titolo: Highs and lows of the French diminutive suffix -et(te)
Periodico: Lingue e linguaggio
Anno: 2024 - Volume: 46 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 245 - Pagina finale: 266

French assigns grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) to nominals, and is endowed with a diminutive suffix -et/-ette. In most cases, the diminutive noun resulting from -et(te)-affixation will have the same gender as its base (Bally 1932), but there are a significant number of exceptions to this rule, that most of the previous literature (Dauzat 1937; Milner 1989 i.a.) took to be the result of lexicalization. In this study, we assess how frequent gender mismatches induced by et(te)-affixation are, in either direction (masculine to feminine and vice-versa), and what the exact semantic consequences turn out to be. In particular, we show that there exists a significant frequency asymmetry between -et-affixation and -ette-affixation, which affects both gender-matching and gender-mismatching base-derivative pairs, supporting the idea that gender-mismatching diminutives are to a certain extent morphologically transparent, but also that -ette-affixation may receive an analysis distinct from that of -et-affixation. We provide a analysis within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993) that is in line with the statistical data and with recent cross-linguistic findings on diminutive an augmentative affixes, according to which such elements may vary in place and manner of attachment, across, and also within, languages (Wiltschko & Steriopolo 2007).




SICI: 1720-9331(2024)46:2<245:HALOTF>2.0.ZU;2-S
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1418/115294
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1418/115294

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